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.

We hate our heroes, you know. That's one of the great things about this whole deconstruction thing - there's no more heroes. It's always been there, you just look at people's reactions, and when the good guys are skunks, those parts stick with us.

I find listening to music in terms of influences, and trying to keep up with what's going on, is sickening! I mean, I'm not deliberately musically illiterate. But I have a pretty serendipitous approach to it.

It's like, symbolic language, the way that people approach dense poetry... it always bugs me, because that approach suggests that it's like a mystery novel, and that if you can put together the clues, you can come up with one singular answer.

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.