As soon as I got into music, I tried to be a working, real artist who gets paid for what he does, who doesn't have a day job.

I'm always looking to rock out. But it isn't really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good. When you look at something that's really good, it might be Iggy Pop or it might be Leonard Cohen. Whatever it is, you want it to be really good.

People go back to the stuff that doesn't cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don't have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.

I don't like to have everything all worked out in my head because there's always a chance of it coming out different than you think it should anyway.

It's sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That's the level where I want to go.

This is a particular thing, you know, catholic stories of martyrs who had their head removed and then continued to be miraculous in the last moments of their life.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.