I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn't something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for.

Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can't be too distracting - it has to be background music, basically.

There are certain records from the 80s and early 90s that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production. Over the last 20 years, myself and a lot of other musicians my age have tried to discover things in 50s, 60s, and 70s recording techniques that were lost or discarded. We've all been trying to crack this code. It's been an important period in the last 15 years, reclaiming some of those lost approaches to making records.

Every band I knew or played with had flyers and properly-recorded demos and contacts; I couldn't even get a gig.

There are a lot of technical studio things I've learned or figured out, and I feel like I could use those things to help other people with what they're doing.

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

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.