The main thing that we're doing is thinking we can control anything, which is the biggest false assumption we can make. I think we can figure out how to tread a lot more lightly on the environment, and we'll be a lot better off.

Sometimes you have to wonder if there isn't an ejector seat built into having a popular-music career. We were lucky when we started. We were already old when we started - you could have described our first album as "aging Brooklyn guys." We were in our late 20s. We weren't octogenarians, but a lot of bands were already younger than us. Fortunately, we've held on to our manly good looks.

People love fact-based songs, which is a very funny idea.

Every declarative statement that comes out of an interview with somebody is actually in response to a question. It's like this very real interpersonal dance where one of the people involved is invisible.

In Germany there's something about rock music much more political than it really is - like everything you were doing was an indictment of the American culture. I read an interview with one of the members of Sebadoh. He was saying he had just got back from touring Germany for the first time in five years or whatever, and one of the interviewers asked him, "Why aren't you still relevant?"

We've been a band longer than most of the people reading this have been alive.

I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about aliens, but I think it seems possible that there's life forms beyond our solar system.