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

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

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.

With the first kid, you micromanage it, making sure there's no hair out of place when it goes off to school. But by the third kid, it's more like, "Oh, you want to wear a splatter-painted, Hard Rock Café T-shirt for seven days in a row and not brush your hair? Go for it. Be who you want to be."

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

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