I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.

I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.

I went to Louisiana Tech, which is just down the road from where we lived. It was an easy college to get into.

We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

I bring a record home, and it connects with me like nothing else. In my ideal situation, somebody will do that with my record.