I'm not interested in meeting people's expectations, and I'm not interested in pleasing people.

We’re really lucky to live in a planet that has so much music. We could be living in some bland planet that had no music, no movies, no books, just a bunch of people going around having jobs and things like that. To me that would be a really miserable place, you know, to me music is what makes this world a really fun place to be, you know?

Even if my songs are a bit low-spirited, they make me happy. I become happy when I hear sad songs. When you sing about sad things in a beautiful way, the atmosphere turns upside down

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.

For me my friendship with Omar Rodriguez from Mars Volta that friendship really means a lot to me because he's another creative person who works as hard as I do.

Right now my taste is going more for things that are organic where the people are using all the sonic possibilities in interesting ways.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.