There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer. About five years ago, I got a turntable that hooks up to your computer, and I put the vinyl in there and I listened to it back-to-back with a CD, and it didn't even compare. But people don't have time to go track down vinyl, lower it in, all that. And they probably don't care. It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

[Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music.

You just want to go back to those 70s albums. Even a lot of the 90s indie records were still done on tape, and you hear the difference.

I try not to do email; I try to talk to people on the phone.

It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.

I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.