I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

I think the other thing that shaped me a little bit is that I really didn't have any success in music until my early to mid-30s.

I would never talk to a girl in a bar, like a pick-up thing. But I could talk to anyone if they wore a t-shirt of a band I like.

You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

When we started the band, I was really like, "We just want to make a lot of records" - not quite unlike Guided By Voices' schedule. I've always thought that our live thing is what we do best, and having a really robust, big catalog makes for the most interesting live band - especially with people, at this point, traveling to see us night after night. For us to have almost 100 songs to pull from is a really cool thing. The sets can be different. They can be invigorating on an intellectual level. I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.