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.

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.

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.

If you can just focus on creating your art whether that's music or writing a book or painting trust me it is really hard to balance that with a personal life. You have to be willing to sacrifice sometimes things in your personal life if your ultimate goal is to pursue things as an artist.

I found when we released Not Your Kind of People it was hard for me to go back on tour, especially when we had some runs that were 7 or 8 weeks in a row and I wouldn't see my family the whole time. It has gotten easier with the internet you know because you can Skype or get on Facetime and connect with your family. It was much harder to do that when we started Garbage 20 years ago.

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.

Now with the world being such a global community, the way the Internet has sort of leveled the playing field because you have so many things that are instantly accessible. It used to feel that way though, this outside pressure that you had to go to New York or LA or actually Nashville if you're into country music to succeed. But obviously we didn't and I didn't move to LA til after I had established us. I think it's easier for people to do it these days just because of the global world we live in.