I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.