Quotes from Trevor Rabin

I'll always do the guitar parts since it's my main instrument.

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.

You're a white South African, and right away you have to explain yourself. Occasionally, I get hassled until I explain my point of view. I have to make it clear that I don't live there anymore, and I don't approve of the brutal racial policies.

Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.

I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA.

The process of composing the film score for each movie is completely different. They all have their own personality and their own completely different life, but there's never been a formula. Each time, it's a new thing.

I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.

I've done that quite often, but I've got to be quite honest... as much as you would want to only do one at a time, sometimes projects overlap and there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you to have begin writing a new project just as you're finishing off another.

When you do a record like 'Talk,' and you're happy with it, and it reaches your ambitions and then doesn't sell as well as you wanted, it kind of takes the wind out of your sails a little.

You know, usually with movies there are periods, dark areas, where I might not be getting what I wanted out of a theme. I'll have to go over and over it again.

I was in Hiroshima with my assistant, and I said to him, 'You know, I've done close to a thousand shows with Yes. I think I'm done. I don't think I can do another one.' I went back to L.A. and left the band and got into film.

All of the directors I've worked with I've gotten along with very well.

Unless the guitar works as a color, then I don't use it, so I haven't been playing guitar too much lately.

When you listen to a Yes album, you should listen to the whole thing through headphones with the lights off.

While I'm quite happy and love doing the atmospheric and quirky stuff, the melodic stuff, I've done quite a lot of. It's also another reason why I try not to do two or three at the same time.

I will be doing a film called Whispers, for Disney. It's about elephants, and doesn't have any people in it. It will be a live action film - I don't know how much I can say about it, since I still don't know too much about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed working on Enemy of the State. Tony Scott is an important director, and has an amazing ability to express himself, and he doesn't do it in musical terms, he does it in emotional terms. I got along really well with him.

It's an important thing to have a relationship with the director, and have it be a positive one.

The reason I stopped doing the band is that I wanted to do something different... Yes had become like 'Groundhog Day' for me. I loved being in the band, but it was album-tour, album-tour, different album-different tour.

I really love writing themes and melody.

I love being in a band. I love that collaborative spirit, although some would suggest that I don't get involved in the collaborative spirit, but it's not true.

Yes well I've done three movies with Samuel L. Jackson, so I've met him a couple of times already. Well, I see him everyday, but its only on the screen.

In my day, when I was a young kid, army duty was compulsory in South Africa or you go to jail. I had the choice, so I spent a year in the entertainment unit, and outside of doing shows - and I used to write for, arrange for the big band - outside of doing that, I actually had a rock band in the army.

You can't judge an album by a single song; it's like judging a book by only reading a single chapter.