When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

Rock and Roll has certainly tried to take its toll on me. I'd rather not talk about my past excesses here, although some hardcore rockers might argue that those excesses were responsible for some great records, but I know which side I came out on.

Since my teen years I was interested in martial arts.

When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.

I also mixed David Bowie's Young Americans album in 5.1 earlier this year and it will be available very soon. Even the original stereo mixes have been re-mastered and sound amazingly good, better than ever, in fact!

My father loved people, children and pets.

Marc Bolan had inspired so many people to pick up a guitar and join a band.

Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it.

Now I know what it's like to be a rock star. No, I didn't sleep with 5 groupies at once. But I was interviewed about 45 times in 5 days in 3 cities.

Oh, it was so hard to leave Paris, just about my favorite city in the world.

My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.

Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica, mom sang in English and Italian, and I played guitar. I'm so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.

No one else in our family was a professional musician so this took an enormous leap of faith on their part.

I grew up to the sound of live music in our Brooklyn household.

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders.

In August most of Europe goes on holiday.

Today a record producer is even more involved and is often the production's sole musician, one person playing all the instruments one-by-one.

My profession is called record production.

My dad's sense of humor was direct and sometimes surreal - his quick wit is well known amongst our family and friends. He raised me on Spike Jones records and W.C. Fields movies, and his sense of humor fell somewhere in between.

I am flying back to New York as I write this. I will never forget these wonderful 35 days and I would go back to Copenhagen in a heartbeat to work there again.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

I could never have a better teacher in those days than my father.

I make records with an open mind, I always have.

I keep reviewing my feelings about the supernatural.

In the last 17 years of his working life, my father was finally rewarded with having landed a great job as first, a maintenance engineer, and then a senior locksmith with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

I love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.

Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

Finally, I would like to remind record companies that they have a cultural responsibility to give the buying public great music. Milking a trend to death is not contributing to culture and is ultimately not profitable.

We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.

I am not a creature of habit.

It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new.

Originally a record producer more or less hired a bunch of professionals to participate in a recording session, the performers and the technicians, and a music director was put in charge. That directly related to a film producer's job.

The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.

But some great records are are being made with today's technology and there are still great artists among us. Likewise there are artists today who are so reliant on modern technology, they wouldn't have emerged when recording was more organic.

I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

When I was 12, all I wanted for Christmas was a trampoline or a four-wheeler. I ended up getting both presents for Christmas.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Christmas albums are not something you do frequently.

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie!

But Tammy Faye calls me, and Ron Jeremy calls me, Erik Estrada sends me a Christmas card every year.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.