There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Every time I make a record, it's kind of like scarification or something. You work 15 hours until you're stupid. You're just kind of all jittery.

I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.

What you see at the Field Museum is only like, 10 percent of the collection. It's birds of paradise and passenger pigeons and in all these drawers that pull out, these specimens come out and it's spectacular. And it worked out.

In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.

There's kind of this unequaled thrill of playing a half-finished song, it's kind of sense of slight embarrassment; like you're blushing. I like doing that. I did that with "Eyeoneye" and it was almost a curse on the song for a while; I debuted it when it was half-finished in a very public way