One of the greatest learning experiences I had was hanging out with Maureen Tucker from the Velvet Underground. There's a woman who has no training and has a very simplistic and very tribal drumming style. I don't even know that she can even do a drum roll, but she's probably my favorite rock drummer because she plays every note perfect.

I have to decide whether I'm just laying down a groove, kind of a bed and canvas for the lyrics and music to live on, or trying to illustrate something in the lyrics.

I hope people just enjoy the music. I'm not worried about any sort of legacy. Whether people view me more as the drummer in Wilco or as a composer who composes primarily for rhythmic reasons - it doesn't matter to me as long as they dig the music. None of that matters to me if the music is crap.

I find a difference between what gets called world music - a fusion of western music and music from different cultures in more of a modernized version - and Explorer Series stuff, which is completely undiluted indigenous folk music. That's a lot more powerful than a lot of the super-processed stuff that comes out now.

One of the greatest learning experiences I had was hanging out with Maureen Tucker from the Velvet Underground. There's a woman who has no training and has a very simplistic and very tribal drumming style. I don't even know that she can even do a drum roll, but she's probably my favorite rock drummer because she plays every note perfect.

I hope that people don't need to look at the liner notes to be affected by the music.

As a drumset player I look outside the typical canon of drums - jazz and rock. When I hear something like the "Monkey Chant", even though there are no instruments on it at all, the rhythms are so intriguing.