I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."