I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

When I was a teenager, working towards dropping out of high school to starting to tour with bands, I'd drive around in my VW Bug every morning before school, very stoned listening over and over to Zeppelin. This song got to me because it just seemed mystical. There is something about those Celtic tunings that almost sounds Eastern. Somehow it would sweep me up into my own little trance-like state, like Sting with those shamans in the Amazon. But all I had was a bong and a Led Zeppelin cassette.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there's old luggage, a couple of bikes. It's big enough to put one minivan in. That's it. No dartboard. I'm so not macho.

I guess it was exciting that every time I pulled up to the gate of my house, I wondered if someone was going to jump out of the bush and stab me in the face.

I'm a skinny, geeky, high school dropout - it works, kids! Sensitive guys always get the girl. You'll get laid 10 times as much as that guy on the football team 'cause he's on steroids and he's gonna get fat.

I'm not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life.