Checking voicemail is like, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" I'm always afraid it's going to be terrible news I don't want to hear.

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.

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

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. I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time. 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. Side one and side two? That's a product of vinyl. But that's not necessarily dramatic form - you could argue that that was three acts.

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.

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.