I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it. It has just as much power in creating a kind of perpendicular sentiment in the music, creating a nice friction that also plays up some of the tension in the song.

When you get respect from the people who are buying your music and coming to your shows, there's an expectation that you have to live up to your own standards.

We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.

Pop music has always adopted the style of marrying upbeat melodies to dour lyrics.

You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

One thing about hanging out with a baby is that you can remember a little bit better what it was like to be a kid, and all the mystery that came along with it.