There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.

Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.

Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.

It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.

I think taking too long to work on a record you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour and I write and I write. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures.