Composer John Adams, in two new videos from his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, shared in honor of his birthday today, talks about his early experiences with music and later finding his voice as a composer.

In this first video, Adams shares some childhood experiences that led him to want to become a composer and taught him about music's ability to communicate feeling and connection on a fundamental level:

In this second video, Adams recounts a crisis of musical identity he went through in his 20s and 30s, divided between the intellectual-leaning contemporary musical landscape of the 1970s and music he felt drawn to by Jimmy Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Aretha Franklin. He describes how he eventually found his own musical language, informed by the minimalist pioneers, jazz, Stravinsky, and others:

Nonesuch released the forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works last year. The set features recordings spanning more than four decades of the composer’s career with the label, plus two extensive booklets with new essays and notes by Timo Andres, Julia Bullock, Robert Hurwitz, Nico Muhly, and Jake Wilder-Smith. Nonesuch made its first record with John Adams in 1985; he was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released forty-two first recordings and thirty-one all-Adams albums. Collected Works includes thirty-five discs of Nonesuch recordings and five from other labels. You can pick up a copy here.