Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time.

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

If you can make art with sound, can't you make music with objects?

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy

That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

People are great. But there's people who you get together with and you talk and you go away feeling energized, you feel inspired. And then there's people who you talk with and you go away feeling horrible, feeling drained, feeling like you're incapable of doing anything. Those people are psychic vampires and I now stay away from them.