I'm not interested in trying to have people who might like other kinds of music follow me. I don't want to please them.

I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there.

The biggest musical influence on me was my mum. We were both enraptured by music.

I moved to Portland because Modest Mouse is there. I didn't necessarily mean to live there permanently, but I've got a really good feeling for it. The sensibility there really suits me. I happened to have grown up in Manchester, a city that was a pretty cool place to be a musician. It's close to Portland in a lot of ways.

Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

Joining Modest Mouse was just consistent with what I used to do as a teenager: I followed where I thought I would make some interesting music.

Some cities are really boring and straight.