Music has been already devalued by the consumer. There's an expectation that it should be free so the race to the bottom has already been won.

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.

If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it's the worst stuff that's mired in pop music.

It's hard for us to talk about how we disdain file-sharing when in fact it probably has been a great resource for us.

I wish I had a better range, but I really have a super-limited one. Barely a tenor, dips into baritone - that's about it.

The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.