You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.

As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive - and it still informs other kinds of music.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.