The live thing is separate from the record for me. I have to figure out a way to make the songs work live. It's always going to be different than it is on a record, because every record I've made, there are people playing parts on there that are not going to be coming on tour with me. As much as still feeling connected to it, it's more like rediscovering.

My dream right now is - and I don't know how to do it, and I don't know if it will work exactly - but just this sort of vague aspiration to start some kind of website where people send in their stories or poems, and me or perhaps some other people turn that into music. And then by the end of the year we make a record and actually put it out. Like a band, but the band is actually a combination of the musician and the fan. I think that's a very 21st-century way of doing it.

A big part of making a good record is really getting a vibe, and a vibe is a mysterious thing. The vibe kind of exists in the air in the room. It's not just all the stuff you put on there, and the specific notes and arrangements and all that. That's like half of it. The other half is just the air, and just the spirit.

I'm always trying to make the music sexier with every album, every tour. I just try to inch my way toward just a little sexier. I know it's tough for me.

Human beings really are this virus upon the earth, and the earth's running a fever, you know? If you step away from that kind of inherent human sentimentality and just look at it neutrally, the universe is neutral morally.

I think it happens to a lot of people who make music just on a computer by themselves, you don't see the bigger picture. You don't see the forest for the trees. You're looking at every tree so closely, and every tree looks so cool. But you're making a forest, man, you're not making a tree.

The live thing is separate from the record for me. I have to figure out a way to make the songs work live. It's always going to be different than it is on a record, because every record I've made, there are people playing parts on there that are not going to be coming on tour with me. As much as still feeling connected to it, it's more like rediscovering.