All these things that we are very nostalgic for come from a place of technology dictating [art]. This time and place is no different.

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.

There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.

What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn't touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.

I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time.

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.

An mp3 is a compressed form of data. It's not the full spectrum. It's never going to sound as good as a record.