You need 10,000 hours to figure out how to be good at something and I agree with that to a certain extent. It's like everything you do to lead up to a great recording or great performance is everything you've done in the past and you can't just, it's rare that someone wakes up in a void and goes and wakes up and makes the most brilliant recording or 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 made so many recordings with junky mics and crappy mixing consoles, you have to use what your tools are and in some ways that's been inspirational.

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.

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 sort of feel I'm only as good as the last record I made. I was on as soon as I finish it I immediately put it aside and move on to the next project.

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.