Speaking at Sunday’s 2026 Grammy Awards, singer-songwriter/actress/multihyphenate Rita Wilson was understandably excited to discuss her new single “Sound of a Woman,” the title track from her forthcoming sixth studio album. But our red-carpet conversation also turned to the surprising sound of another iconic woman.

Two days earlier, Wilson had had the honor and delight of introducing the Foo Fighters and Taylor Momsen’s buzzy appearance at Mariah Carey’s MusiCares Person of the Year gala, where the Foos and the Pretty Reckless frontwoman performed, for the first time publicly ever by anyone, two tracks from Carey’s lost ‘90s grunge album.

“First of all, it must be so secret, because I tried to find it on the internet and I could not find it!” Wilson laughed, referring to the mythical Hole/Sleater-Kinney/Garbage-inspired LP that Carey secretly recorded in 1995. “It’s Mariah Carey’s grunge album that she did with her band Chick, called Someone’s Ugly Daughter. And the Foo Fighters, if you don’t know this, are amazing Mariah Carey fans — huge fans. And so, I think it was their idea to tribute Mariah in this way. And if you noticed at MusiCares, she was singing along to every word, stood up. It was fantastic!”

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Carey co-produced Someone’s Ugly Daughter with her friend Clarissa Dane, who was credited as Chick’s lead vocalist after Carey’s record label, concerned that the project would ruin the pop star’s glossy image, intervened. (Sony forced Carey’s original vocals to be stripped, and Carey was demoted to backup-singer status.) The long-out-of-print Chick record has sold for as much as $800 on resale sites like eBay, although Wilson was thrilled to learn that it has since resurfaced on YouTube.

“I think that the Foo Fighters and Mariah should redo the album and put it out,” Wilson proposed. “I actually think that was Dave Grohl’s idea when we were backstage. It was like, ‘I think we should do it,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, 100 percent! Exactly!’” When it’s suggested that Wilson should also join the new Chick lineup, she brightened and quipped, “Oh, I’ll join Chick, absolutely! I’ll just play tambo. I’ll do it!”

In the meantime, Wilson is focused on readying her own deeply personal album, Sound of a Woman, out May 1. The titular single was co-written by Wilson and Amy Wadge (Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” Kacey Musgraves, Alicia Keys, Kylie Minogue, James Blunt, John Legend, P!nk, Mika, Noah Cyrus).

“It was partly inspired by this quote that I read that was on my bulletin board by Michelangelo, the famous Italian sculptor. And the quote was this,” Wilson explained, as the veteran actress prepared to break out her best Florentine Renaissance accent for dramatic effect. “People asked him, ‘How do you carve these incredible statues out of these huge chunks of marble?’ And he said, ‘I see the angel in the marble, and I carve until I set him free.’ And I thought to myself, ‘That is the perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be in this world.’ You’re born, you come into this world, you evolve your entire life, and you chip away and carve away the things that don’t really work, that aren’t really you, so that you can arrive at who you are. And that’s what the album’s about.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

Jeff Goldblum is one of his generation’s most beloved actors, known for his roles in both blockbuster popcorn-movie franchises like Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and Wicked and cult classics like The Fly, Earth Girls Are Easy, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and several memorable Portlandia episodes. But he’s also an acclaimed and accomplished jazz pianist, releasing four albums with his Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, who just announced a world tour playing some of their most prestigious venues yet.

So, when Goldblum and his wife, dancer and Canadian Olympic rhythmic gymnast Emilie Livingston Goldblum, briefly joined me on the red carpet on music’s biggest night, the 2026 Grammy Awards, I had to ask how he — unlike many “moonlighting” actors who shall remain nameless — was able to make such a credible transition to the jazz world and be taken seriously as a musician.

“You’re so nice. What a lovely question. Well, in a nutshell, yeah, we’re doing OK,” Goldblum said with his usual humble charm. “We’ve got our fifth album coming out on Decca, on Verve and Fontana, June 5. It’s called Night Blooms, and we’re the most proud of it of anything we’ve done. And we’re going to around celebrating with a tour — we’re going to the Sydney Opera House and to the Royal Albert Hall, with a 50-piece orchestra. So yes, as you say, things are going swimmingly.

“And how did that happen? I don’t know. It’s just very lucky. I feel at the height of my powers in acting, but at the same time, this thing has taken off — the seeds of which were planted when I was 10 years old and started to study,” Goldblum reflected (referring to his idolized other brother Rick, who died in 1971, and who instilled in him an early love of jazz). “I started to call cocktail lounges around Pittsburgh and tried to get jobs there, just as a fun thing, as I pursued [acting]. My heart was set on the acting career, so [the music career] has kind of blossomed unexpectedly and magically.”

That was supposed to be my only question, due to Goldblum’s tight red carpet schedule (he was set to co-present the Best Contemporary Country Album award that night on air with Lainey Wilson). But when I joked about the pressure of making sure my one allowed question was a good one, he had joked, “There are no bad questions, except the ones you don’t ask.” So, I couldn’t resist slipping in a second query, about a deep cult in his filmography:

“Will there ever be an Elephant Man musical?”

“Very good question — from The Tall Guy,” he chuckled with clear amusement. The 1989 British rom-com, which marked the feature-film debut of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually ), starred Goldblum as a struggling American actor working who lands the title role in a Andrew Lloyd Webber-like London musical, based on The Elephant Man, called Elephant! — featuring numbers like “He’s Packing His Trunk,” “Here He Comes, Mr. Disgusting,” and the finale, “Somewhere Up in Heaven, There’s an Angel with Big Ears.”

“Well, Richard Curtis wrote that. He’s fantastic. And hey, as you know, I like the musical theater world!” laughed Goldblum, referring to his recent role as the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the Grammy-winning Wicked and its sequel, Wicked: For Good. “I love David Lynch’s Elephant Man movie… who knows? Sounds good to me! If you’re involved, sign me up.”

As an editor’s note, I’ll mention that I have since learned that there was an Australia production called The Marvellous Elephant Man: The Musical, which ran in 2022-2023. But I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as entertaining as entertaining as Elephant!, because Goldblum didn’t take part. So, watch his space. And in the meantime, look out for Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra’s Night Blooms and tour dates later this year.

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

When Reba McEntire performed at the 2026 Grammys, held Feb. 1 at Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena, it was, incredibly, her first time ever singing on the Grammy stage. That alone would have made the occasion momentous, but McEntire (along with Brandy Clark and Promise of the Real’s Lukas Nelson, son of Willie) was tasked with one of the evening’s most daunting and important assignments: appearing in the ceremony’s In Memoriam tribute.

And this year, that segment hit especially close to home for Reba.

“I’ve got a lot of friends on that screen tonight. My oldest son, Brandon Blackstock, is also up there. He went on back in August,” McEntire told me on the preshow red carpet, referring to her talent-manager stepson. (McEntire was married to Brandon’s father Narvel Blackstock, for more than 20 years.) “So, it’s going to be a very emotional song to sing. But Lukas Nelson, Brandy Clark, and I will do our best to get through it.”

As the country queen steeled herself to perform a retooled version of “Trailblazer” — a song she cowrote with Clark and the track’s other two recording artists, Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert, as a way of “honoring the [country music] ladies who have been before us who have gone on” — she revealed that she could hear the voice of her stepson in her head. She knew that the talent manager, who died last August from malignant melanoma at age 48, would give her just the right tough-love pep talk she needed.

“I know Brandon would say, ‘Suck it up there, Mom! Get up there and do it,’” McEntire chuckled. However, when she was a coach on The Voice, she was used to helping her own contestants power through emotional and deeply personal performances. And she’d remember some advice she received from another dearly departed loved one, her mom Jacqueline, who died in 2020.

“I’ve always had a little trick that my mother told me: When you get a little emotional, look up at the ‘EXIT’ signs, and try to read it backwards,” McEntire revealed. “It gets you out of that moment of heartbreak when you’re just about to choke, and so you switch [in your brain], and then you stand and you can tend to business. That’s why you’re there.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

At the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, held Feb. 1 in Los Angeles, guitar god Nuno Bettencourt was in a fantastic mood as he spoke with me (and other remote reporters from around the globe) at the Recording Academy’s Virtual Red Carpet press box. And that was before he even won his very first Grammy, for his work on Yungblud’s “Changes (Live from Villa Park),” which took home the prize for Best Rock Performance.

Bettencourt had only been nominated one other time, at the 1991 Grammys for Extreme’s “More Than Words.” But this was an especially important honor, as Yungblud’s performance was taped at Ozzy Osbourne’s Back to the Beginning all-star tribute concert in Birmingham, England — where the Prince of Darkness sang live for the very last time, just 17 days before his death.

Yungblud’s Back to the Beginning performance — which included not just Bettencourt, but also fellow 2026 Grammy-winners Frank Bello (Anthrax, Helmet, Satyricon), Sleep Token drummer II, and Osbourne keyboardist/rhythm guitarist Adam Wakeman — was the breakout moment of the July 5 event. The fact that it was an unbilled appearance, that its arrangement was switched at the last minute, and that it was the only official single to be released from that concert, made the Recording Academy’s acknowledgement all the more special and meaningful.

“It was something that was crazy, because the night before we actually performed it, we didn’t really have an arrangement for it,” Bettencourt revealed. “The original was just piano and vocal, and I was like, ‘Why don’t we make this the “Purple Rain” version of this song? Let’s make it like emotional, and we include the band rocking.’ And we didn’t know it was going to touch people the way it did.”

While Yungblud has certainly had his share of haters, who’ve wrongly dismissed as some sort of pop-punk poser, the British rocker radically reinvented himself last year with his Idols opus, which also scored nominations for Best Rock Song (for “Zombie”) and Best Rock Album. However, it was his surprise Ozzy tribute in Birmingham that finally silenced many rockist doubters.

“He obviously came from the pop world initially, but I think he’s that kid that’s kind of like, when you’re around him, you feel the rock ‘b’ roll in him,” said Bettencourt. “And with the vocal performance he had that night on that song, I think changed his career — because the emotionality of it, it was touching, and it was magic.”

When I mentioned that what Queen was to Live Aid, Yungblud’s performance was to Back to the Beginning, Bettencourt marveled, “It’s incredible that you said that, because the text that we got when we got offstage was from a Queen member. It was from Brian May, who was in a box, and he said, ‘That performance really touched me.’”

As for Osbourne’s feedback and Bettencourt’s memories of that historic night, the guitarist said with a chuckle, “Well, the crazy thing is, back in the 1900s as a kid, when Randy Rhodes was still in the band and before he passed away in that accident, after he passed away, there was an ad in Circus magazine that Ozzy’s looking for a new guitar player. I think I was about 14 or 15. I’m like, ‘This is my gig! I’m getting this gig!’ So, I borrowed gear from my friends, played two Ozzy songs, sent it in. Every day after school, I was asking my mom, ‘Dd they call? Did they call?’ And I’m like, ‘No, really? They didn’t call me?’ So, then of course, Jake Lee got it. Ten years later, Ozzy reached out to my booking agent and said, ‘There is a jet waiting for Nuno at Heathrow. He’s got the gig.’ And as he’s telling me this, the only thing I could say is, ‘They heard the cassette!’ … To me, he’d finally heard it.

“And the last words that Ozzy said to me, when we were taking that photo [at Back to the Beginning last year], is he grabbed my wrist really hard and he said, ‘You are the only beep that said no to me. I think that’s pretty special.’ So, that’s the last thing he said,” Bettencourt added a bit more somberly. ‘We didn’t know we were going to lose him after that.”

Another way in which Bettencourt’s Birmingham experience was a full-circle career moment was — as a remote journalist from Music for Music People pointed out — Prince, whose “Purple Rain” inspired that day’s “Changes” arrangement, once declared Bettencourt one of the three greatest guitarists of all time.

“I am still in therapy because of it. I’m still in therapy, because he’s one of my idols, if not the top,” Bettencourt joked. “And yes, when he came to see me perform live and said that to one of my best friends after the show, they were messing with me: ‘We’re not going to tell you what he said!’ And that meant the world to me, because I have so much influence in the funk part of what Extreme is and everything that we did. And yes, this [Grammy] partly has to go to [Prince], because those are the words that came out of my mouth at rehearsal: “Let’s do the “Purple Rain” version of “Changes.”’ And that’s what it was. And I believe that that’s why it was as emotional as it was, as ‘Purple Rain’ was. We all cried. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time.”

As Bettencourt headed back the Premiere Ceremony learn the results of the Best Rock Performance category (which included worthy nominees Amyl and the Sniffers, Linkin Park, Turnstile, and Hayley Williams), Bettencourt already felt like a winner.

“[Osbourne] attended his own life celebration, his own funeral, his own everything. What a legend,” he gushed. “To me, the win was already that day. Whether we win or not [tonight], it’s beautiful thing to be here.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

Forty years ago, something totally awesome happened at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards — something that changed not only television, but the public’s perception of electronic music. That fateful evening, onstage at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, elder-statesmen keyboard icons Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock joined new-school new-wavers Thomas Dolby and the performance’s newest-to-the-scene participant, Howard Jones. Resplendent in billowing yellow satin while brandishing a keytar, Jones and his fellow synth pioneers delivered a futureshocking performance that has come to be known as the Great Synthesizer Showdown of ‘85.

“I think it was a very significant moment, because it suddenly changed the view of all this new technology that people were using,” says Jones. “It was like, ‘OK, these instruments are electronic, but it is just another instrument. There’s nothing to be worried about. They’re not going to take over your world and steal your children. It is just another way of working.’ And full stop, that thinking was dead after that show. … So yeah, it was a moment for me, and a moment for keyboard players and electronic musicians around the world.”

Jones went on to have a very good 1985 — racking up four top 40 U.S. hits, including two that made the top 10; playing Live Aid; and going platinum with his sophomore album, Dream Into Action, for which he wrote all of the songs and played most of the instruments. And yet, he was still dismissed by the so-called “cool press” as a manufactured (or simply too-cheerful) pop sensation. But four decades later, now it’s Jones who is an elder statesmen of electronic music — and any doubts about his abilities or talents have long vanished. He has continued to push himself creatively, be it with 2015’s ambitious multimedia ENGAGE! Project; 2019’s Transform LP (which featured three collaborations with logical successor BT); the pandemic-era song cycle Dialogue; or his new concert album, Live From the O2.

Below, the synth legend chats about his humble beginnings, the power of positivity, shattering stereotypes… and how he just might have accidentally invented the keytar.

LYNDSANITY: I’ve interviewed you before about your 1985 Grammy performance. It blew my mind when I first saw that. It was basically four frontmen — solo stars who also played keyboards — and that was unusual back then. Do you realize that was pioneering? Even now, there aren’t many synthesizer players that are up in the foreground, like you or Thomas Dolby were.

HOWARD JONES: That’s a good question. My big hero when I was growing up was Keith Emerson, and he was a frontman and keyboard player. He was like the Jimi Hendrix of keyboards, sticking knives in the keys and rolling over the stage with a Hammond on top of him — I mean, absolutely outrageous, but the most exciting thing ever. That’s where I got my biggest early influence, a keyboard player, that you can be the frontman and play keyboards. And I developed that idea with portable keyboards. They hadn’t made them at that time, but I strapped Moog Prodigy’s around my neck and played them. I had wires coming out and roadies used to feed them out to me! It was a way to not be that the guy with the glasses at the back of the stage that you never notice that plays keyboards. I did not want to be that. That wasn’t going to be me.

So, you invented the keytar, basically?

[laughs] They may have existed, but I wasn’t aware of it. But I knew I wanted to have keyboard and travel around the stage, so I just strapped it around my neck. And it was great. Then I could put it back on the stand when I’m done with it and play it normally. When they finally did come out with [real] ones, I jumped on that, and [keytars] have been with me ever since.

Photo courtesy of Howard Jones

If there are any pictures out there of you with a Moog strapped around your neck like a necklace, I’d love to see them! So, I don’t if the right word is “unfashionable,” but it was not really in vogue at the time to be the front keyboard person in the early ‘80s. Didn’t you have to put on your own record label showcase in London to get a deal? How did that go over?

Yeah, that’s right. It was very hard. … We organized to do a residency every Monday night for four weeks and invited all the record companies down, all the publishers down, to see me. … We weren’t based in London, we were outside in High Wycombe, which is a very ordinary town, with no cool scene going on there. You had to create your own. And [the music industry people] all came down and none of them got it. “One guy with a load of keyboards around him and a dancer? We can’t relate that to anything that we know has been successful in the past!” The typical thing of not being able to spot anything that’s original — until one guy did. But that was back in my hometown at the time. He came to a show and did get it and got the songs. His quote was, “We missed out on Depeche Mode. We’re not going to miss out on this guy.”

Related to the topic having difficulty getting record labels to understand what you were doing, I’ve read that you think you weren’t considered “edgy” enough then. A lot of songs from the new wave/post-punk era were kind of dark and miserable, but most of your material was anthemic or positive. I’d love your thoughts on that — why is being dark or miserable or depressed considered “chic,” but declaring that things could only get better or that you want an everlasting love isn’t?

Oh, I don’t where to start with that! I mean, it’s not that I didn’t like any of those [darker] bands or even the style of their writing, but it wasn’t who I was. And I didn’t even want to write love songs or anything. I wanted to write songs that were about philosophy. How do you deal with life and how do you be a successful human being? It seems ridiculously hard to do that. So, I wanted to write songs about that. And I wanted to be a cheerleader rather than a sort of sympathizer, if you know what I mean. We all go through pain and agony and stuff like that, but my thing was, “Don’t crack up. Bend your brain. See both sides. Throw off your mental chains. Let’s do it.” I had no problem at all with people who weren’t doing that, but that was just me. I liked songs where people were encouraging me as a young person: “You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.” And that’s where I wanted to come from with my music. Of course, that wasn’t considered “cool” at the time, so I was portrayed as a manufactured pop star in the “cool” press. What? Excuse me— I’m playing all the instruments myself on the record. I’m singing. I wrote the songs myself. I did the whole look myself. And you are saying I’m manufactured? But the great thing is that gives you such a good, strong spine, because you need to have that in this business. People will have a go at you at any opportunity… there’s people who want to knock you down, so you’ve got to be tough to keep going and stick to what you want to do.

But what about two of your biggest hits, “What is Love?” and “No One Is to Blame”? There is hope in those songs, but there’s a lot of melancholy too. They aren’t super-cheerful.

Yes, that’s true. But it’s still coming from that point of view. “No One Is to Blame” really, at the end of the day, is about how it’s really difficult being a human being, with all these things you have to cope with in your head, all the influences and all the pressures. And if you don’t have a view on it, you’ll go down a dark road. But yeah, I agree with you.

Do you consider yourself a generally positive, happy person?

I often think that, no — it’s almost like the opposite. I was very familiar with cynicism in my mind… and I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to be a cynic. I wanted to be somebody who just fractionally is on the positive side — realistic, but with a hopeful attitude about getting out of it. Otherwise, you may as well just give up and forget it. But I didn’t want to do that. But I was very familiar with the cynical. I think maybe it’s part of British culture to be like that, which is maybe a bit of a problem that we have. That’s why I wanted to counteract it with what I was singing about.

You just mentioned how you wrote and played everything yourself. There were certain artists of your era where that was hyped by the press — Prince being the most obvious example — but then there were other cases, like with you and with George Michael in his early days, where that wasn’t really emphasized. And I wonder why that is. Do you think it was just the ‘80s vibe — the videos, the bright colors, the satin outfits, the keytar — that caused you to be taken less seriously at first? Like, if you’d just been sitting at a grand piano, would you have been received differently by critics?

Yeah, I often reflect on how those initial reviews and stories that are written about you, how they get embedded in the culture, and it’s so hard to break out of them. You have to spend the rest of your life trying to put the record straight. But maybe that’s a good thing, because I’m still doing it and I’m still very passionate about what I do to this day. Maybe I would’ve just sat back if people were going, “Oh, wow, he plays everything himself. He writes all his own songs. He’s doing things that nobody’s ever done before onstage.” If there hadn’t been that pushback, maybe I wouldn’t have had the impetus to keep going. And really, it’s important to carry on — that’s what it says in my lyrics, so I’ve got to be that!

Obviously I grew up in America, and you were huge here. You had nine top 40 hits in the States and were on MTV all the time. Were you bigger in the U.S. or England?

I was definitely bigger in America. Which was and is still unusual.

Do you think that because your hopeful lyrics resonated more with American listeners?

I think that’s a big part of it, and I love that. I’m very so pleased about that, that it was taken in a genuinely positive way.

But when you did Live Aid in 1985, you played the U.K. show, at Wembley in London. What memories do you have of that?

I don’t where to start, really! It was incredible day. Just literally flying in on a helicopter with Brian May from Queen was pretty epic. I hung out with Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney — not just saying hello, but for half an hour! I met David Bowie, who had been following my whole career. He was saying things about me that I just couldn’t believe, and that was massive for me. And then doing the song, you know who we were talking about me being the “synthesizer guy”? Well, I played piano, so people were going, “Oh my God, he’s going to play piano! This is going to be a disaster!” But I’d been playing the piano since I was 7; it was the most natural thing. And I did “Hide and Seek,” which was not one of my big hits. It was a song that I thought would be appropriate for the occasion. But the audience joined in with me on the chorus, and it was sublime. It was a sublime feeling that I still remember now, because it’s still there embedded with all the adrenaline that was going on.

I mentioned the “Synthesizer Showdown,” and I know you chuckled when I said that, but seriously, that’s my favorite Grammy moment of all time. No one had never seen anything like that. It must’ve been so exciting for you to be onstage with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby, making history at the Grammys.

It was absolutely great. I think it was a very significant moment because it suddenly changed the view of all this new technology that people were using. Me and Tom were pioneering, but those guys [Wonder and Hancock] were using [that tech] as well. Stevie was known for his embracing of new keyboards and new technology and stuff. So, it was like, “OK, these instruments are electronic, but it is just another instrument. There’s nothing to be worried about. They’re not going to take over your world and steal your children. It is just another way of working.” I mean, on a Queen record, they said “no synthesizers were used in the making of this record,” all that stuff. It was pathetic. And full stop, that thinking was dead after that [Grammy] show.

And I got to hang out with Stevie in his studio and jam with him — just me and him. What an amazing thing to be able to say that you did. We were just trading riffs back and forth and jamming on various keyboards that he had around the studio. I’ll never, ever forget that. And Herbie is an amazing man as well. So yeah, was a moment for me, and a moment for keyboard players and electronic musicians around the world. I think it was a really significant moment. … [We] were bringing those instruments to the public and showing how they could be used, so I felt certain pride about that.

Herbie Hancock, Thomas Dolby, Stevie Wonder, and Howard Jones at the 1985 Grammy Awards (photo: YouTube)

Everybody plays some form of synthesizer or electronic instrument now. People create huge hit in their bedrooms on laptops. I kind of forgot about how at one time, keyboards were considered the enemy of rock. So, what was the mood in the room, at the Shrine Auditorium? I imagine there were a lot of old-guard record executives and musicians there. Were they looking at you guys thinking, “What the hell is this?” Or were they into it?

As far as I could tell, people were really enjoying it. It was so unique. I don’t know how many keyboards we had arrayed around us, but it was dozens. I hadn’t been to the Grammys before, so I wouldn’t know to compare it with anything else, but I certainly thought that people were really digging it and enjoying it. … And I didn’t feel intimidated, actually. I should have probably felt that a bit! But I think it was probably to do with the fact that I’d just hung out in the studio with Stevie and we’d jammed together and he kept going, so he must’ve enjoyed it. It wasn’t like he was grinding his way through; we were having fun, having this musical dialogue. And I’d grown up with his music, studying his music and learning to play his music. So, when we [successfully] jammed together, I kind of got over any sort of terror of being intimidated.

It’s interesting because electronic music in general, even now, doesn’t always get respect among rockists. It took six nominations for Kraftwerk to get in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Only one electronic artist, Daft Punk, has ever won a Grammy for Album of the Year. It’s sort of an open-ended question, but why were people so resistant? Why did they think that music just had to be guitar, bass, and drums? And there’s still people that feel that way, which surprises me.

I think I was shocked too. I always thought rock ‘n’ roll culture, pop-music culture, was the alternative: open-minded, embracing, not box-ticking. And I suddenly thought, “Oh my God, it’s the opposite of what I thought! People are not embracing change. They’re ridiculing new things. They’re not embracing new ideas. They’re not supporting young people doing new stuff.” I was a bit shocked with that, but that’s why you just have to keep going. You’ve just got to be who you are, and don’t compromise on that. Be who you are. Just do it. People will come and they’ll listen and they’ll like it. And if they don’t, they’ll listen to something else. It’s that easy.

Did you ever mention, when you were in that Live Aid helicopter with Brian May, like, “Hey, man, why did it say ‘no synthesizers’ on your record?” You had a captive audience…

[laughs] No, but I got to do band stuff with him when we were doing the Prince’s Trust concert. I was in the band. He was in the band and he was always really respectful to me and I felt very, very supported by him. He’s a very, very nice man. I don’t know where that came from.

I’ll just put this out there: Would you consider getting Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, and Thomas Dolby together and redoing it somewhere? You could maybe even do it with some younger synth players as well.

That’s a good idea! I mean, my friend BT, who’s like a genius keyboard guy — it’d be good to have him there. What a great idea.

Awesome! To wrap things up kind of where we started, we were talking about the anthemic feel of your records. Do you have any stories about people saying your music helped them through tough times?

Oh, yeah! So many that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I know it’s made a difference to people — and that’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s your legacy. It’s not anything else. It is not how many records you sold; it’s whether it had an impact on people. And I’ve had so many. There’s a song called “Specialty” on Dream Into Action that particularly really meant a lot to [many fans]: “‘Bout time you realized/You are a specialty/There is no one like you/Spend your life worrying/’Bout what you could have been/Can’t you like being you?” People felt liberated by that. That’s great. I’m so happy with that.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarify. Listen to audio of Howard Jones’s full conversation in the video at the top of this article.