I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.

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.

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.

I just started going to shows. I don't know how submerged I am: I feel guilty that I don't get out more, but I really like being inside the house.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.