If you'd asked me what I'd wanted to do five years ago, I'd have told you I wanted to be Viktor Vaughn or The Game - I would want to be a rapper with an eight ball of coke in my pocket and a wad of hundreds. Because that kind of freedom - well, perceived freedom - is where I want to be.

I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.

Ultimately, the question, "does it really matter?" is a question of humanity. If you're into the pursuit of fidelity, it's a really interesting question. Personally, I don't think digital sounds good, but that's just my own feeling.

Making love to robots will probably be great one day. It's just not a viable option right now.

The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.

I was living in Gainesville, Florida, and our babysitter brought over the soundtrack to The Who's "Tommy" - not the actual record "Tommy", but the soundtrack to the movie with Elton John and Aretha Franklin. I remember hearing it for the first time and it was so confusing. It was like waves and waves of unknowable and indescribable sound coming out of the stereo.

To make a live record - something that has a lot of life in it - is difficult. After slaving away for years in the studio, when I hear a No Age record or when I hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first EP or when I hear DRI or really early punk stuff, it's just so powerful, so raw - and I know how hard that is to create. It's very deceptive. It's like a Dardenne brothers film - it seems like just a handheld camera following some people around in a trailer park, but it's incredibly difficult to do that.