Being in a band, a lot of times people think of what you're doing in terms of a competition. They talk about where you are professionally in your career, and all this other stuff. And if you're a lifer, you know it's going to be ups and downs. It's not like anybody is always just steady on.

It's always interesting to me when one platform of media crosses into another. We've been on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air a couple of times, and I suddenly felt like we could actually represent ourselves as exactly who we are, in this sort of ultra-vivid way. But the weird thing to me is that the questions she asks are in some ways no different than the questions the guy from the high-school paper asks. She might even ask us where we got our name. But something about it, it's like the pH balance of the trajectory of the questions. Maybe it's just her voice.

Between me and my wife, there's this joke where I'll be doing some fun interview, and I'll get off the phone and be like, "That guy was an idiot." A lot of times, interviews are like being asked a list of questions. Invariably, there will be this part where they think you're a writer for Letterman: "Just off the top of your head, tell me the 10 most influential bands on you." And you're actually asked to come up with a spontaneous list. It's like, "Dude, I'm not living in High Fidelity."

To a lot of people, angels are a matter of faith.

When we're on tour, probably we don't go 24 hours without someone asking us where we came up with the name They Might Be Giants. Which, on one level, seems like a completely legitimate question. If I think of other bands, like The Beatles, it would explain to me that John Lennon had a proclivity for slightly cheap puns. But I'm not sure how much insight that would give me into what's actually good about The Beatles' music.

It sucks to think about, honestly, but when you really consider the resources that it takes to press vinyl records, or the amount of gas that it takes to tour, it's really quite scary.

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.