When I run across something that feels like a real eye-opener, it's gonna have an influence on me forever.

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

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'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.

I think I've always been extremely conscious of the kind of empowerment that comes from realizing that you're in a position to express yourself. And the fact is that - and this is the thing about punk rock - that everyone is in a position to create culture, and that point has never been lost on me. To me, that's an important political aspect of doing this, and trying to live in a way that's about dialogue as opposed to like... spectacle.

I'm the kind of person that, as a listener, will go the extra mile to interpret something that's fairly meaningless, or that might be meaningless.

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.