I want to have freedom of thought and expression - not get beaten down into some corporate existence, where there's so much risk of embracing the truth that you feel like you can't do it.

To leverage those things that are common to everybody, and to present them in a way that's sort of naked, is more courageous in art than constantly trying to be evasively too cool.

I'm not a super prolific creator, I don't make stuff everyday, and I don't have a soundtrack constantly playing in my head. I think I had years and years of pent-up aesthetic ideas that I wanted to express.

One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.

I've always felt that singing is half technical, half taxing. You've got words, a melody, and an instrument, and you have to do justice to the words. You're just a medium for people to feel the song.

In a certain respect, in a movie, you inevitably have a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs because that's the only practical way to get it done. When you make a record, you can still be an auteur, because you can make a whole record without anyone's help if you want.

I'm the one driving the strategy and I'm an artist. What I've convinced the company to do is to just be totally open about exactly how everything works.