To say someone is a producer... it's kind of a slippery term.

The fact of picking up an instrument and writing a song and expressing yourself publicly has a powerful political dimension.

I think there's been this long cycle of the big companies making a lot of money by underestimating people's intelligence and people are used to it now. So, they're so used to having their intelligence underestimated that, for most of them, it really isn't worth the bother of paying a little more attention to something that might hit them on a deeper level. But you can't really read people's minds.

Stage presence is not something I spend a whole lot of time thinking about. On the one hand, I do, because I have, like, favorite front-people and I know what's excited me to see in a band. But I can't be David Yow [Jesus Lizard frontman] and still play guitar.

I worry about financial security, and the older I get the more I worry about it.

I always feel like the less I think of stage presence, the better, because then I have to face the fact that I have really complicated guitar parts, I'm singing almost all the time, and I have like six pedals I've got to keep on top of

I'm an atrocious business man, because it's just not the way I think about things. And that's pretty much what all that Grammy/MTV kind of stuff is tied into.