It's pretty amazing, someone having that kind of charisma - and it still happens in micro and macro forms - to convince a whole gaggle of people to kill themselves. Or put on robes and jump up and down. That takes a very charismatic leader.

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

Everybody's got a dark side, but mine doesn't include being around people who are mean.

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. 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.

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

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.