I'm often a firm believer in "the simpler the better" approach and it's evident in my guitar setup.

For some reason, I deliberately allow for simple things like three chords to mystify me. It's kind of fun that way. Like Billy Gibbons' guitar sound isn't the way it is because he uses a quarter as a pick or anything as simple as that; it's because he's in touch with a different sector of the cosmos that we know nothing about.

My setup for a live performance lately has been just guitar and synthesizer. Sometimes I only bring one. The guitar is in pretty bad shape and isn't sounding the same. Most of the time my live approach has been pretty different from recording.

For instance, we have the largest Polish population of any city except for Warsaw, and the largest Lithuanian population outside Lithuania. More Italians, Greeks, Irish, Latinos, Serbians, and Croatians than you can shake a stick at. Chicago has it all, I don't know why I'd ever leave.

I only use the computer for editing. I don't have an eight-track, otherwise I probably never would have bought a computer. When I first got my Mac, I was exploring its possibilities and had fun with all of the sound hacking software, but I'm not interested in that approach. I toyed with the idea of releasing a 12-inch of all the stuff I did early on but good sense prevented me from doing so.

Even back then I really didn't enjoy playing chord changes, riffs, and solos when I was young. The only thing I enjoyed playing were these Robert Fripp-type double-picked loops that no one wanted to hear, including me; I just liked playing them.

I've liked music since I can remember and the guitar was always the most attractive thing about music to me at that time. I played guitar in a high school band. I played guitar in various other bands up until I was 20, but nothing too serious. From time to time someone would ask me to play with a group, but I stopped playing with band-oriented projects as a whole soon after.