It's just as political, what you do in the bedroom is just as political as what you do in public.

My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.

Now we're in an age of singles. It's actually always been more about singles for most of music history.

My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

The Greeks really believed in history. They believed that the past had consequences and that you might be punished for the sins of your father. America, and particularly New York, runs on the idea that history doesn't matter. There is no history. There is only the never-ending present. You don't even have your family because you moved here to get away from them, so even that idea of personal history has been cut at the knees.

In a lot of ways, work was my graduate school.

It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.