You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

We all come back to our little worlds.

We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.

I'm more into Neil Young and radical honesty.

When you listen to the Anthology of American Folk Music, or anything like that - a compilation of garage bands from the Northeast in the early '60s - you're not necessarily listening to the band and thinking about the lead singer, or the story of the group, or the context or the mythology of the group. You're just listening to the song and whether or not it has a hook.

Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they're doing now.

I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.