With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to.

I remember you would record a guitar part, and we would have to sit there for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for the computer to process it. You'd see the little wheel spinning on the computer, and you'd be praying that the hard drive didn't crash and you didn't lose the performance.

Back then, Pro Tools only had four or eight tracks, so we couldn't actually hear all the tracks. We could only hear eight at a time, so if a song had 25 or 30 tracks, we wouldn't be able to hear it until we went into the studio an put it all on tape. The process was a little bit backwards.

I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.

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.

For the records I've work on over the last 10 years, I get sent the really compressed version and the non-compressed version, and oftentimes you end up going with the more compressed one because it's what people's ears are attuned to. I think the bigger problem is saturation and people being desensitized.

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.