When it's a pop song, I don't really want to do pop songs, but they exist and sort of come out by accident.

I don't make records for this medium with which we're going to sell it. The selling of it can never be more important than what you're actually making. There's too much of that in the world - in everybody's world, not just in music. There's too much, "Are you hip to this kind of stuff?" "Hey, this is cool." "Are you hip to it, because this is what we're selling today?" I think it's bullshit.

I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."

Sometimes it's easier to make decisions when you know that you've tried things that are so wrong, you know, "OK, I don't go that way with it. I don't go this way with it." The way I work, I kind of have to go down all those wrong paths to know that the one I'm doing really is the one that is going to work.

I want my records to be the most magnificent and glorious-sounding records, but also want them to be the most intense and fragile. And I want that all in the same ten-second bit of music. And it just takes a while to get there, and I don't write the songs and then go and record them, I write in the studio. So it takes a while to kind of piece them together and know that that's what I want it to be like. And I constantly throw the bits up in the air and see how they land, and eventually they kind of keep landing in the same place and that's where it stays.

You know, I'm unable to make those records where you just go in a studio and that's it. I think you can capture so much more on a record than just a particular performance on one day.

Making a record's a real fight for me. I'm constantly fighting with this thing inside of me that says I should be sitting in a room with Matthew Shipp or I should have Han Bennink on drums or this song should be playing for the next 20 minutes in my head, not a silly little pop song. It's constant.