Over the course of several months, Todd Bernhardt and Andy Partridge have been discussing Andy's approach to the guitar, examining his history with the instrument, his influences, and why and how he does what he does with it.

This conversation offered fans an opportunity to ask Andy guitar-related questions, and now it's time to get the answers to those questions! This prompted a wide-ranging discussion, so we're posting the answers in two parts, the first of which is below.

The song of the week is Andy's version of Captain Beefheart's "Ella Guru," which Colin helped Andy record at Drive Studios, in Swindon, in 1988. Originally released on the compilation album Fast 'n' Bulbous: A Tribute to Captain Beefheart, it's also appeared as a B-side accompanying the Oranges and Lemons singles.

While you're here, please keep in mind that you can support Andy, the APE House label, and XTC by popping on over to the APE House and purchasing something from the wide variety of music and merchandise there, available in formats to fit every taste. Independent music is only as strong as its supporters, and we need your help to keep this experiment in musical freedom and a square deal for artists going! Thank you.

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TB: The first question is -- and I'll give you the MySpace usernames as we go along -- is from Muddy Suzuki...

AP: I'm familiar with that name!

TB: Ah-ha! Well, you might have already talked about this to a certain degree in the previous interviews, but he wants to know how much of an influence Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's approach to guitar arrangements were on you.

AP: After reading John French's depressingly wonderful book, I realized that the influence is not so much Don Vliet, but it's the style of his guitar players over the years, notably Bill Harkleroad, who was Zoot Horn Rollo in the Trout Mask band. I think he also plays on Decals.

I really liked that they had a new way of looking at an old format -- they dealt with the Blues, and then pulled it apart. I loved that. Trout Mask Replica is so pulled apart, and made of an enormous amount of collage pieces -- I mean, Don'd whistle them things, and they'd have to work it out. Or, he'd go and splang a lot of stuff on the piano, then poor old John French would have sit there and notate it or record it, and then give it to the band -- "Okay, you play this line, you play that line, I'll get the general feel of the drums" -- whatever. I think John French had the job of taking the Captain's musical gibberish and sort of apportioning it out, you know?

TB: Right. So, he was the musical director of the band.

AP: He was very much the musical director, and the shame of it was that Don took his name off of the Trout Mask album, because John French dared to stand up to him about something. He's been reinstated in the CD version, but at the time there was no Drumbo, and he's the man who in many ways is responsible for the Beefheart sound.

It's really the way of thinking outside the box that thrilled me -- taking two guitars, bass, drums and a vocal -- which is like every Pop or Rock group -- and taking it as far as you could take it. It was like it was beamed in from the future -- like what they'll do with guitars, bass, drums and vocal in 100 years' time or something. They took it that far in 1968, '69, '70. It was so thrilling to me, at a very formative age. I thought, "Wow! It's actually okay to take the basic instruments of a Pop group and go that far with them." It gave me enormous license to think that what I was playing was not a bunch of mistakes, or was not wrong. It could all be right if it was herded together [chuckles] in the right sort of order, if you know what I mean.

TB: So, in a way, you're saying that he taught you it was okay to embrace what you would have otherwise seen as mistakes?

AP: What I might have seen as mistakes, and what it might have taken me, you know, 30 years to get to. I could hear somebody else going there, thinking, "This is permission to take your music out far." Of course, I never got as out-there as Beefheart's bands, but they moved the perimeter so far, you had a lot more room to play in. Instead of a little corral of one acre -- "This is the accepted thing you do with guitar, bass, drums and vocal" -- they moved it out to make the size of two or three football fields or more. "Wow, all this space to run around in!"

TB: One of the things Muddy Suzuki says is that he hears a lot of Beefheart's influence especially in the live-XTC-era sound. I guess the follow up I'd add there would be, do you think Beefheart's approach was an influence only on you, or did the other members of the band recognize what the Captain was doing and embrace it?

AP: To answer the second part of it first, I don't think Dave was very interested in Beefheart. Dave's tastes are much more conservative -- he likes his Blues unmessed-with. The farthest out he'll go with the Blues are some of the earlier Fleetwood Mac recordings. I think Dave's favorite Beefheart record was probably Clear Spot, which is about his straightest album, maybe.

Colin, I think, had a sort of respect for Captain Beefheart -- I know he liked some of the later things. Colin got into the Bat Chain Puller album quite a lot. I don't think I could get him too interested in Trout Mask Replica, though.

Funnily enough, I think the influence showed more in the Barry Andrews era of XTC, where I just felt compelled to kind of joust with Barry and, I think, he felt the same of me. That was more in the spirit of the Magic Band -- although of course they worked everything out beforehand, perfectly perfect. You had to be able to play it in your sleep. With Barry and me, it was more a sense of improvisation in the moment, but I think it was more in the spirit of the Magic Band.

When Dave joined, although we had the same sound as Beefheart's band -- we had two guitars, bass, drums and vocals -- because of Dave's sort of conservative approach to doing things, and because of my desire to want to work more and more on the songs, I think we actually got straighter, if you see what I mean.

TB: The next question comes from vwortboy, and it just might be a whimsical question...

AP: One whimsical answer, coming up!

TB: "Panmodal 13-bar Blues -- fact or fiction?"

AP: 13-bar Blues -- don't laugh, I'm sure the Rolling Stones, on some of their early singles, blundered into 13-bar Blues! You count the measures on "Little Red Rooster" -- I think they're running purely on an approach of, somebody nods and you change, you know?

Panmodal? Sure. Although I don't know if we ever were panmodal. I think the Magic Band were, but we always had a key center. I might not have known what the key was, because my musical background is not deep! But if I hear it, I can find it and play it. I have scant regard whether a note is in the "allowable scale" -- that's caused me a few frictions down the years.

Though I don't think we were panmodal, we knew how to take a mode and urinate all over it when necessary. Tin Pan Modal -- that was the alley behind Tin Pan Alley. A lot noisier.

TB: [laughing] The next one's from Johnny Thompson...

AP: That has to be a pseudonym, right? Who would have a weird name like that? [laughs]

TB: [laughing] I know, it's far too normal for the 'net. But he gives his full name -- "John M. (Johnny) Thompson." If you look at the comments, he's got an animated .gif of himself abusing a violin...

AP: Oh, Jesus! Tell him to drop that immediately! That gives me brain ache when I look at it! You know, it's like...

TB: [laughing] Like an acid trip in a little square!

AP: No, it's like when people with various disorders get near a band that's got a strobe light -- it takes me into a funny place. I have to move away so I can't see it. I don't think he's doing himself any favors with that [chuckles].

TB: He wants to know about guitar arrangements, and mentions several songs in particular. Maybe you can find a common thread on this. The songs are "Wake Up," "Liarbird," "Blue Overall," "Holly Up on Poppy," "Humble Daisy" ...

AP: Whoa, let's take one at a time! [laughs]

TB: And he adds, "and yes, the chords on the bridge to 'Earn Enough For Us,' the first XTC song I tried to cover."

AP: On "Earn Enough," he probably means the C up to D, which I then push with a B-flat 6. Get those going and you should be able to work out the rest — there's an A-minor lurking in there somewhere as well. Most people oddly don't get the chorus chords right — they are G with open ringing G string, then an F but also with open ringing G string, then — I don't know its name, what a surprise, eh? — but the chord of, lowest notes first, G, C, D, G, C, F.

I originally thought he was asking about "I'd Like That," and I think I've forgotten what the chords to that bridge are! They're probably a seventh inversion -- like if you're playing an E7, you play the E7 in the middle of the guitar there, and you have an A-flat on the bottom. You need a very agile thumb to do that. I'm a bit of a Bonobo, so I can do that. I use my thumb a lot.

TB: That's an interesting thing to talk about. I've noticed other players doing that -- certainly Hendrix, who had these enormous hands, used his thumb a lot...

AP: Well, my hands are quite small, you see -- bad luck, girls! [laughs]

TB: [laughing] That's okay -- your feet are enormous, right?

AP: [laughing] No, they're quite petite as well! So ... hey! [laughs]

TB: It's how you play the guitar, not how big it is, right?

AP: Exactly. So, I can play barre chords, but I never really got into it -- I always saw it as more of a kind of classic guitarist thing. When I saw people that I liked, they were just kind of grabbing the guitar, so I thought, "Well, that's how you do it! Oh yeah, you can use your thumb anywhere you like there." So, it's those sort of inversions -- if you were playing an E7, you'd play an A-flat on the bottom -- if he moves that inversion around, he'll find all the chords.

TB: Okay. As far as the other songs are concerned, do you see any common thread running between them?

AP: No, not at all. His choices are all very different. On "Wake Up," Colin already had the two guitars worked out, so it was a matter of Dave and I apportioning who played which cross-rhythm. Most of the guitar playing on "Wake Up" was plotted out. The biggest changes on that song were on the drums, and on the sort of orchestral side of things -- the "choir" and all that.

TB: "Liarbird" is the next one.

AP: Oh, that's very different. I think Dave plays mostly keyboards on that. Most of that album was written on a guitar tuned to the chord of E, so if you tune your guitar that way, you could probably blunder into most of the chords. They're quite straight.

TB: I think around that time Andy Summers was playing a fretless guitar, and I often wondered if you had something like that on there, because the playing strikes me as very "liquid."

AP: I know what you're saying, but it's not a fretless guitar. I discovered that if I played open tuning and hit the strings really hard with my thumb, they'd go "breeeee-ong." They're resonating together and sort of buzzing on the frets, and I put a little gentle chorus effect on the guitar to emphasize that as well. It's a standard guitar with an E tuning, and I'm striking it particularly hard, to get that sitar-like buzz.

TB: "Blue Overall" is the next one he asks about -- Dave's playing slide guitar on that?

AP: Again, that's an E tuning. As you say, Dave's playing slide, while I'm playing mostly the chord-y stuff and singing my guts out.

Incidentally, it was very cruel of the people at the BBC who did the program looking at Todd Rundgren's production on Skylarking. They had a bit of Todd saying that I used to like to chuck the kitchen sink into my recordings, and then they pulled up the fade-out of "Blue Overall," which is one of the most cacophonous things we've ever done! That was really unfair. [chuckles]

TB: "Holly Up on Poppy" is next.

AP: That's a tuning where I dropped the bottom E string down to D. If you play sixth chords with that, and quite obvious kind of barre-y chords, you'll find most of the inversions on that one.

That song is not so much arranged between guitars -- Dave's mostly on keyboards on that, I think. I'd have to study the tracks to really pull this out -- I'm doing it on pure memory -- but I think I'm on the acoustic guitar, and Dave's on keyboards. If there's any other little guitar-arrangement things, it's probably Dave.

TB: "Humble Daisy"?

AP: That's normal tuning, me playing a very quiet electric, and Dave playing keys and what you would call single-line guitar work. But there's nothing in particular I can tell you about the arrangements of these, short of what you can hear, if you see what you mean.

TB: Sure. I thought maybe it was you playing those single-line runs on "Humble Daisy."

AP: No, that's Dave. There's a demo of "Humble Daisy" on Fuzzy Warbles where you can hear about 80 percent of how it was going to sound, really.

TB: Another question that he asks is, is there any chance of a proper XTC piano-vocal-guitar anthology?"

AP: There was one many years ago, in about '81 -- Eleven Different Animals. Virgin/EMI Publishing did that, I think, and they probably didn't sell that many of them -- it was withdrawn quite quickly.

Dave did most of the pulling apart of the songs, and where there were two guitar parts sort of colliding to make a certain sound, he'd try to approximate what the chord would be on one guitar.

TB: The funny thing that is, that's probably not what most XTC fans would be looking for -- they'd rather know the two different parts are!

AP: What the two different parts are, or the three different parts with the bass as well! Or drums or keyboards as well! They'd probably want to pull the whole tapestry apart.

But certainly nobody would pay for that these days. I mean, the vast majority of the XTC material is still published by EMI, who have it for perpetuity -- that word -- and I think sheet music sales are so low these days that they wouldn't ever do anything like that. Of course, I can't do anything like that because I can't read music -- it's all sparrows on telegraph wires to me. So Dave had to work all that out.

TB: Then, finally, Mr. Thompson wants to know your " kid-gloveless take" on his other British idols -- Steve Hillage, Roger Waters, and Jeff Beck.

AP: Jeff Beck, I think, is pretty amazing. He has a lot of soul in his playing. Incidentally, I know that Jeff Beck doesn't play with a plectrum these days, and funny enough, I'm playing less and less with a plectrum! It just gives you more of an immediate contact with things.

But I think he's very soulful and very inventive. It seems he's largely been written out or ignored of the great players from the '60s onwards, to some extent, which is unfortunate.

TB: He goes away for long periods of time, and so people tend to forget him a bit. But I think he's going through somewhat of a resurgence right now, since he's touring more.

AP: I wish he'd stop dyeing his hair black and wearing those stupid cut-off-sleeve shirts! He looked so much cooler when his hair was brown and he wore shirts with sleeves. But I like his playing a lot. Maybe he hasn't risen to the top of the pile purely because of the songwriting thing. He doesn't really write songs. Someone like Hendrix was churning out a lot of material, or even Clapton. I'm not crazy about Clapton's playing, though I liked Hendrix's a lot. But I think they got carried upwards by the songs as well, whereas Jeff Beck doesn't have that carpet to waft him up, you know? It's just playing. Which should be enough, but unfortunately it's frequently not.

Steve Hillage I don't really know much about. At one point in XTC's career, the idea of Steve Hillage was a bit of a joke, because of the whole Gong/hippie/cosmic-teapot/dope-fiend thing, which we found really silly. So, unfortunately, the name Steve Hillage was sort of synonymous with joke-y hippyness for us. But from what I've heard of his playing, it's very distinctive and has a nice, water-like flow to it! I can't say that I know enough of it, though. He's probably a very nice man and a very good player, but I'm just not familiar enough with what he does.

Roger Waters? I don't know. I think for five minutes he had a kind of distinctive thing where he was leaving open notes and then playing high notes to sort of ring against them. You know, the "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" sort of thing, and Ummagumma-era Floyd. Droney riffery -- I don't know what else to call it. Otherwise, he hasn't registered with me, and certainly I'm not crazy about his songwriting. Floyd, for me, honestly did cease to be when Syd left. For me, he was the spirit of Floyd.

TB: triplegoddess wants to know what you think of Al Kooper.

AP: He asked me to put out an album of his a couple of years ago, but he was only offering the rights to the UK, and for the cost of getting it pressed up and promoted and all that kind of thing, I didn't think we would sell enough in the UK to make it worthwhile. I got back to him and said, "Sure, we'll put it out, but can you give us rights for around the world?" But he couldn't or wouldn't do that, so it never happened.

Again, I don't know enough about his background. What I do know about him is kind of the Thickipedia version -- the kind of Dylan sidekick thing and those '60s things he did.

TB: A representative from The Onlymen says, "I'm curious about how guitar duties were assigned between Andy and Dave in the studio. Did they just knock the song around with different approaches until one idea sounded better than the other, or did Andy decide, "Dave, I'm playing the solo on this one and you just make pretty chords"?

AP: It was usually down to my laziness. If we were doing it live, I had to find something I could play and sing. So I usually would have the easier of the two things -- what you might classically call "rhythm guitar." Because if I'm doing a vocal as well, it's got to be something I feel at home with, if you see what I mean. I can't be stopping the vocal to look down and think, "What the shit am I playing here at this point?"

TB: But was that true once you became a studio-only band?

AP: No. When it was the live years, I would usually go for the rhythm angle, because when I was singing, I couldn't be fantastically ornate and sing as well. So, the more ornate stuff was Dave, who's smart enough to know that if I was playing down low on the guitar, his inversions should be high up, to keep them away from mine. Or if I was playing high-up, he'd pick something higher or lower, out of the way of that.

But when we stopped live, it was more a case of me demo'ing things up from that point on, rather than us feeling it out in rehearsal, and fitting 'round the need of, "Well, Andy's got to sing and play simple, so I'll..." When I was able to make demos of the songs, I had more time to work out what I thought the other parts would be. Or, if I couldn't play the instrument, I'd sketch out my ideas on guitar. For example, "Me and the Wind" -- I really wanted that on piano, so on the demo I just sketched out on guitar what the pattern would be. Then Dave transferred that to piano.

But if it was a guitar thing, I could sketch it out, to give Dave a launch pad. But he always thought up his own solos, and thank goodness that he did, because some of them are very memorable. You know, things like "That's Really Super, Supergirl," or "That Wave," "Real by Reel" -- where Dave gets the totally free hand at the solo thing, it's usually very memorable.

TB: Did you ever give him suggestions on the solos, where, say, he'd come in with something, and you'd say, "You're almost there, but how about trying this?"

AP: Yeah -- in fact, I wasn't his friend at all with the original take of the solo on "That Wave," because I didn't like his original solo, and I knew he could do something much more spine-tingling. But he said he couldn't, and so Nick Davis and I went off to begin the mix. Dave then asked if he could come down to the mixing session with his guitar and amp, because he'd worked out a much better solo. He plugged his amp and guitar in, and just did this real hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck, "Bloody hell, that's phenomenal! That's the one!" kind of solo. His conscience got the better of him [chuckles] -- rather than walk away from the plate, he had to step up. And he did, totally obliterating said plate!

TB: Yeah -- it's a great, great solo.

AP: It's like somebody falling into the water from a great height.

TB: And then climbing back out again.

AP: Yeah, and reaching up to the sky. Fantastic stuff.

TB: The next question is from Uncle Choppy...

AP: Uncle Choppy? He's not like a mass murderer or something, is he?

TB: Maybe he is! And he's somebody's uncle.

AP: [laughing] Exactly.

TB: He says, "Given Andy's epiphany when he started using the original Line 6 Pod amp simulator during the Wasp Star era, I was wondering if he'd tried out any of the newer incarnations of the Pod modeling units, or even software emulation stuff, for his guitar sounds?"

AP: I haven't, actually. Stu's got a pretty good one that's in his computer setup that I can't remember the name of. It's an amp simulation-type thing that gives you lots of choices, but you play into the computer -- it's not a standalone box.

I have to say that the Line 6 Pod was a helluva Road to Rome moment for me. Before then I just used a little cheap Korg multi-pedal effects thing, which I thought sounded pretty damn good, especially through Dave's little Fender amp, which I always used to nab in the studio. You could really crank it up without being too offensive -- it sounded good driving it with a little compression into the amp.

By the way, that's a good thing for guitarists -- if you don't know that trick, a little compression going into the amp makes the amp work smoother. You can add a bit more later on the mic, if you want, but a little bit going into the amp is a good thing. A lot of people only put it on the microphone on the amp later, which isn't always the best option, because the amp's banging too hard sometimes, meaning the poor old compressor at the desk end is having to hold everything down. If you put a little bit of compression going into the amp to start with, the amp seems to work smoother, because it's not dealing with such spiky peaks from the guitar. Then you can add a little bit more later.

In fact, that's a good rule for compression -- a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit later down the chain, a little bit when you mix, a little bit on the mastering, and so on. Don't do it all at once.

TB: Because you might overdo it.

AP: You'll just kill it, and it kills the sound. Chain them up, a little bit, as you go along.

TB: Good advice! So, Jim Leen and Karl Muzicka both want to know if you would talk more about some of your obscure tunings, and what part the tunings might have played in your songwriting process.

AP: Well, notoriously, the one that was the biggest revelation for me was just blundering into the E tuning. I thought, incorrectly, for many years that this was Keith Richards' tuning, but I think he uses more D tuning.

E tuning, for me, was a hell of a revelation, because literally a whole album's worth of songs fell out of that [The Big Express]. The guitar becomes new again, if you see what I mean. You can even play the shapes you used to play on some songs, and you've got brand-new songs out of them. In fact, that was the case with "This World Over" -- big chunks of that song are the same chords as "Complicated Game," but with E tuning.

TB: Interesting -- I didn't know that. Are there any more arcane tunings that you've used?

AP: There's the one where the bottom E is dropped down to D. There was a D6 tuning that I used for "Mermaid Smiled." I can't tell you exactly what the strings were tuned to, but the guitar sounds like a D6 when you strum it open. There was the very odd tuning that I think was like a D7 tuning -- that was only for "Gangway, Electric Guitar Is Coming Through," and seeing how that track was never properly recorded [it was released only on Fuzzy Warbles, Vol. 4, that tuning didn't see the light of wax, as it were [chuckles].

Colin uses a lot more obscure tunings than I do, though. The big one for me was finding the E tuning, which was very inspirational. If you can find an album's worth of material out of a new tuning, you're doing something right, I think.

TB: Indeed. Mr. Kamikaze has a question -- I'm hoping he's still around to read the answer!

AP: [laughs] Exactly! He's still here, but has a very flat nose, shaped like the deck of an aircraft carrier.

TB: He says, "I've often wondered whether Andy comes from the Jimi Hendrix school of playing, where he struggles to re-create the sounds in his head on a guitar, or if what we hear is exactly what was intended."

AP: There's sort of a split answer to this one, actually, because sometimes I do have sounds in my head, and I have to look for them on the guitar. But that's rarer. What usually happens is that I'll stumble on a chord or a repetitive pattern that then does the thing of making a picture in my head. You know, you'll play a certain chord, and you'll think, "Whoa! That sounds like a tree!" Or, "That sounds like a bushy undergrowth or something." And then you'll start thinking, "Bushy undergrowth ... tree ..." and before you know it you're describing in words what this is sounding like to yourself, and you're on your way to writing a song.

So, for me, it's usually blundering into chord shapes, or patterns of chords or part-chords, that set off the synesthesic kind of muscle, if you're with me.

TB: Sure, I see exactly what you mean. We've already gone over the second part of his question, but he has a third part -- he want to know how many of your "weird chord inversions were happy accidents and how many were worked out."

AP: Most of them were probably happy accidents. And then they do suggest a certain thing. For example, I stumbled on some chords that, to me, sounded like a large, modern futuristic city, and they became the backbone to the song "Beatown." That's happened lots of times -- in "Scarecrow People," the main chord, to me, sounded like deserted farmland out in the Midwest somewhere. They make pictures -- these chords make pictures for me, and describing the chord picture often becomes the song.

TB: Michel has a question -- by the way, he's the one who has the animated .gif of him playing clarinet...

AP: [laughs] Oh! Tell him to drop that immediately! Same effect. It's killer strobe. I have to look away from seeing his picture whenever I read the comments. That really upsets my brain -- it's like a high-pitched whistle for a dog or something. I become somewhat unnerved.

TB: [laughing] He wants to know your opinion of three guitar players he loves: Snakefinger, Pierre Vervloesem and Marc Ribot.

AP: I vaguely know Snakefinger, because he was one of The Residents originally, or hung around with them. Creatively claustrophobic, I'd call Snakefinger -- the late Snakefinger, I think. He was highly reliant on a harmonizer, I think. That was a lot of the Snakefinger sound -- a harmonizer set at unusual intervals.

I don't really know the other players, unfortunately. I've heard the name Marc Ribot, but don't really know his music or playing. It's difficult for me to get interested in guitar players, because I think all my interest in guitarists happened when I was a learner, and then my allegiance switched over to, "Okay, I can kind of play like that now -- what can't I do? I can't write songs! So, let me find out about songwriters." I squeezed all the juice I could out of guitar players, and then kind of moved on to the pomegranate of songwriters. And I may have squeezed all the juice out of that now, so I'm not sure what to go to!

TB: I was going to ask, is that still what fascinates you? Are you still looking for the perfect song?

AP: I figure that part of the reason that I may not be working on "traditional" Pop songs now is that a large part of my brain -- and this is going to sound really arrogant -- is that I may have gone through several perfect songs. It's very difficult for me to top "Easter Theatre" or "Rook" or "Wrapped in Grey." I may have exorcized a lot of those kind of Lennon-and-McCartney, Bacharach-and-David, Brian Wilson type ghosts out of my system by doing all that.

At the moment, I'm kind of more interested in the landscape of sound, hence the upcoming album of sounds inspired by Richard M. Powers. And, by the way, to that fellow who wrote in and said it was a shame that I wasn't recording songs anymore -- you're going to hate that album! [laughs]

TB: [laughs] But do you know what? I love it. I think it's brilliant. I've listened to it on headphones, I've listened to it in my car...

AP: How is it to drive to?

TB: It's fantastic to drive to! I was really interested in that, because I was thinking it was not going to be as good an experience as listening on headphones, but in some ways it's better -- the background noise of the road and everything else just kind of melds into what else is going on.

AP: It kind of helps it, sure.

TB: In some ways it does, yes.

AP: I've had records like that -- where you're going along, and you're hearing stuff, and it's just at the right volume where the sounds around -- like traffic and bird noises and goodness-knows-what from the street -- just blends into the sound.

TB: I found that it was oddly calming. I don't know why, but I found myself relaxing and just letting myself go, even when I was in traffic. I wasn't getting frustrated by the gridlock, but was fascinated by the musical landscape around me.

AP: That's great! Perhaps we should sell it that way -- "Drive calmly with Andy P." [laughs]