My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn't stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn't have his blood.

I don't have a good attention span and can't spend long in record stores or video shops or games emporiums without getting grumpy.

We were a small group of weirdos and baby punks and gays and free spirits who had to use our imaginations a lot. We only saw pictures and read zines, so we could only interpret the aesthetic and message of punk scenes around the world. We were basically the duck-billed platypuses of punk.

I've never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller, and it just didn't work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight, and they all had big voices too; just different than mine.

I shave my body in all kinds of ways, wear tons of eyeliner and dye my hair pink.

I think from a major-label perspective, if you were on the flip side of things and that's the world you were used to working in, your interpretation could be, "Oh, they're having trouble writing songs," when really it's like, "No, I'm not ready to write songs, I don't want to write a song right now, if I did write a song, it would be forced."

I knew that if I wanted to stop being a pushover I had to get comfortable with small rejections myself. That took some work, but because of it I can now say no to other people with a clear conscience.