When I dream about music, or think about music, by myself, I try to be as free as possible and allow my creative mind full reign.

That's just the way people's brains work. If you want to talk about something, you have to reduce it to a form that can be understood. That's one of the reasons I'm not good about boiling down music.

I think I know what my bandmates like or are interested in or would be interested in doing. I take ideas and I develop them, get rid of some ideas, keep writing, and then new things come up.

Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation.

I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I never hear music the way anyone else does, and I no longer find it surprising.

For me, the voice expresses things that there are just no other ways to express.

Any material can be treated in any number of ways. Sometimes I might hear something, or someone else might hear something, and say, "Wow, that sounds like classical music." Somebody else might think it sounds like a slow jam.