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

I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded.

In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.

I know my own limitations. And if somebody says, "I need songs for a cartoon garage band - they look like this and they should sound like this," it gives you a direction. I like having that kind of assignment.

There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable.

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.