I suppose I've always had a very genuine curiosity about religion. I loved the atmosphere of churches, the ethos; I adored Evensong.

I'm not the first Christian to have a fruity past. I hesitate to compare myself to St Augustine or St Paul, but there is a precedent for this sort of thing.

Music has given me a decent pension. I am in that rare position for a clergyman of having some provision for my retirement. Thank you, young people of Europe.

I wanted to put together a Christmas album that went back to the stable in Bethlehem and the source of it all. It kind of gets lost sometimes.

The figure is still the only thing I have faith in in terms of how much emotion it's charged with and how much subject matter is there.

Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith. And because the Democratic Party was taken over by the aggressive secular guys, they became hostile not just to conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, but Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Mormons.

I think that all the powerful religions are pretty much the same. People like to pretend they are very different, but they are not. They are really about believing in something bigger than yourself, something that's unseen, and about having some faith.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.