I like to deal with my dark side in a creative way, and just sing about killing people instead of actually doing it.

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.

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

The most important thing is setting up these directives for yourself. Like, "I'm only going to use these three colors - go!" That's why Einstein wore the same thing every day; you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every morning.

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

I think anything that you can't poke fun at is a little too precious.

The schematics are a little bit tricky, but once you get it down you're able to really program an entire show. Every song has a lot of different guitar sounds in it, so that's what it is.