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.

One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear.

One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.

Usually I'm trying to get away from my discography. I don't think I could tear down everything I've done, the structures I've created - you know, like what Miles Davis did eight times in a row, which was destroy every kind of crutch or system he had for making music. That's very, very difficult. When I reflect on my catalog, I'm very proud of it, and I love it, but what I want to do now is completely different. When I don't do something different, I feel like I'm cheating - consciously or unconsciously stealing from myself.

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.

Caffeine gives me hope. Sometimes, when I brew my wicked strong Irish black tea just perfect, about halfway through the mug I feel a clear and overwhelming feeling of optimism. It didn't surprise me when a study a few years ago implied that suicide was much less likely among coffee and tea drinkers.

The funny thing is that even engineers and techs don't know what a tiny telephone connector is - people call them TT connectors. Engineers used to come by all the time and say, "Why are you called Tiny Telephone?"