In my entire life I never set out to do anything ground-breaking or pioneering, and I'm not going to start anytime soon.

When I was really young, I was really into Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and those kinds of bands.

People like a story that has a lot of blood, sweat and tears. But I don't think the Slint story really has that.

I don't know if it was related to the type of music that we were doing at that time or what, but Todd Cook actually just turned to me and was like, "You know what would be a great name for a metal band? Dead Child." We talked half-jokingly that we were going to do a band. I guess as time went on, I started writing songs that were more metal sounding, and it just evolved from there. It actually started with the name first, and then the songs came second.

Most people found out about Slint in the mid or late 90s, but we were an '80s band. We started in 1986 and broke up at the end of 1990.

When we woke up every morning, one of our things was, "Let's go put a new sign in the back window of the van." Those are the different signs we had up in the back of our van, so that the people behind us could have something enjoyable to look at.

I was into the music, but the idea of showing up places on time or having to tell people when you're not going to be somewhere - that just didn't even cross my mind.