I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.

I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music.

Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write.

I started out in theatre and I definitely have wanted to add extra musical elements to my music with both imagery and text.

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing.

There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times.