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The Future, CBS Records, 1992 recurrent airplay favorite                    at  MATT RADIO View the all-time countdown here!

In "Anthem" you say, "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."  It's not a very happy thought to believe that something will always have to be broken in order for light to get in.

It is a happy thought if we enjoy the truth.  There is always something that will have to break.  Usually it is our personal pride.

A Buddhist thinker said that disappointment is a great way to illumination.  Other masters said, "From the broken debris of my heart I will erect an altar to the Lord."

The idea that there is a staircase of gold and marble which leads to knowledge is seductive, but it seems to me that the idea of something needing to get broken before we can learn anything is a more true idea.  It has been my experience; maybe you can escape it, but I doubt it.  Unless the heart breaks, we will never know anything about love.  As long as our objective universe doesn't collapse, we'll never know anything about the world.

We think that we know the mechanism, but only when it fails do we understand how intricate and mysterious the operation is.  So, it is true, "there's a crack in everything."  All human activity is imperfect and unfinished.  And there's something positive inside us that can only be located through disillusion, bad luck, and defeat.

                          excerpted and paraphrased from an interview conducted by João Lisboa for Expresso,
                                                             a weekly Portuguese magazine, July 9, 1994