Music is kind of a strange business, and it's too weird of a job to have mean, conniving people around.

Checking voicemail is like, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" I'm always afraid it's going to be terrible news I don't want to hear.

I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.

I had brief glimpses of emotional catharsis while writing. I remember reading something Philip Roth wrote about how he writes every single day, but it's almost as if he has amnesia every morning - he has almost zero confidence that anything will come but he just sits down and plugs away. And at the end of the day it feels like a miracle: "How did I do that?" I had a similar experience where it was just about putting in the hours and being present.

I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.

I wanted to give the songs a run for their money, to see if they stood on their own without a lot of accoutrements. It made more sense - and it was easier, too - to go out alone and see if these songs could get in a couple of fistfights and still be standing.

Everybody's got a dark side, but mine doesn't include being around people who are mean.