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

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.

It's a mysterious thing that a whole generation of young people can come up and see and understand things that previous generations weren't able to see or understand.

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit.

I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music.

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.

It scares me that people are going to stop writing music. I don't mean music that has to be physically written down, but they'll stop using their brain which is without a doubt the most powerful tool that you could have in any art.