Everyone from the pope to some hobo thinks, "I'm a human being. What am I doing here?" You can't get carried away with fame and fortune and all that. It's all nonsense. The whole pop-star side of it is all fun and good, but you don't get anywhere without putting in the hours. I get so fulfilled when we play a song live that we spent hours working on. It's all cool. Fame is something to have fun with, but you shouldn't take it too seriously because it is bollocks.

The word mystical is an even worse word than spirituality - that artists take drugs, and then they add some crazy extra thing to what we all know is real. But our job as artists or as human beings is to investigate what we really think is real.

So I have probably 1,200 little bits of paper with notes, which when the Ambien really starts to kick in, don't really make much sense. Say what you like about prescription drugs, but they do help when you're sequencing a record.

I don't mean to sound like a cheap prostitute, but you can call me what you like.

The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen.

All the children of America, up to age seven or eight or nine or ten - they're really great artists. So here we've got this amazing work that very few people pay any attention to, and it's not valued by the culture.

More idiots should just shut their mouths.