An acceptance of your cultural inheritance, and at the same time a dislike of it, is a building block of good art.

It's pretty awesome to be in a band with your wife! The tour, it beats you down, and we can just share that, and sometimes revel in the experience. If she wasn't here, or she was just here as a civilian, she maybe would feel uncomfortable.

It's sort of cheesy to introduce that to the drums - those dings and dongs and bell sounds. That's definitely one of the reasons people are like 'oh yeah, they sound like Tom Waits, with those trashcan drums.' But at the same time, it sounds so good! And it introduces this... I mean, it's not tuned, but somehow it adds this extra layer of melodic texture.

An acceptance of your cultural inheritance, and at the same time a dislike of it, is a building block of good art.

Bruegel has these paintings of people just... interacting with each other. And there's this special wink - it's not a celebration of nature, it's people that are mongrels, and half-wits, and they're doing terrible things. I don't know, it just seems like something worth singing about.

Live is best. You have movement, and I think we should do as much as we can to put that sense of movement in the recorded music.

Ten people who are into our music is better than three hundred people who are just standing there.