I've always said I write albums; I don't write random songs and then sort them out.

You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.

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 don't know if I have any real aspirations to be an actor. It was just something I was asked to do in sort of a friend way. And I thought, Why not?

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.

Everything I do is 100% automation, which means I'm just doing it live.

When I go on a nostalgia trip it's not aesthetic. For me it's about trying to recapture the smell or the feeling of something that I've experienced in the past personally.