In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.

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.

People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.

When I became conscious of being a person, when I was very small, I knew that I was from Indiana, but I had never seen Indiana. I was born there, but we moved when I was, like, a year old. I always had a sense of a place that was far away from where I was. I would research it and find out about it and I remember on Christmas morning I used to always call Indiana to find out what the weather was like; to see if it was snowing or not.

The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.