Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.