Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, "I will never let that happen to you."