I'm a gear head. I love gear. If I have the choice, of course I'd rather use a great microphone, a Neumann microphone and a vintage Neve board.

All music done, as I said, through low res mp3 and $5 earbuds and so I think as a producer or a band you want your music to sound good in that medium. Sometimes when I'm doing a mix I'll listen to it on my laptop, on the crappy speakers on my laptop. It lets me know what the tracks gonna sound like if someone else listens to it that way.

I'd work on Garbage or I'd edit a song or writing here, but I was able to do a lot of things with my family. There are things outside of Garbage, the whole band has come to realize that we need things like that. That's why we took that break. Garbage had swallowed us up and had become a full time obsession for us and we needed to escape that and reclaim our old lives.

What I love about analogue is it really forces you to go for a performance. I hear these young bands play perfect and they've been manipulated so much that there's not much personality to them. It's taken away some of the rawness and immediacy you get from a human performance.

I'm trying to be present in my daughters life as much as I can. I didn't have any kids or really any family. I have a family but I just dove into work 1,000%. I think as an artist when you're young like that, when you move into your 30's or 40's if you have time to focus on that you need that time. It's part of that.

The first Garbage record sounds bizarre, it's not a pristine sounding album. We ran everything through stomp boxes and through samplers and that definitely gave it a vibe.

It's funny, I don't really feel that nostalgic. I only recently started putting up some photos from some of the sessions I've done over the years and some of the Garbage sessions because my daughter, who's 10-years-old, when she was about 6 or 7 she was more curious about what I do. I have all these platinum records and stuff, they've all just been in boxes in storage for years but I started just digging through those things because I sort of want her to be aware of my past. I never really put the old recordings on and listen to them and go, "Oh that sounds great."