I'm first and foremost a guitar player. I've been playing since I was 12, which is over half of my life.

Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.

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.

CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression.

Every part of every song can have a totally different musical sound, because otherwise if I wanted to go from a verse of one song to the chorus of another, I'd have to go: "Uh, okay, press that pedal and then... press that pedal, and then press that pedal off."

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

I know that, physically, I'm a very demure-looking person. But I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow. I'm lucky that I get to play music, and that it's not going to come out in some totally destructive way.