The technical reason why remastering is valuable is because, up to around the late 90s, there was this endpoint called zero, and you couldn't get louder than zero.

I don't have a role model, but I certainly have always enjoyed Neil Young. I had the great pleasure and opportunity to watch him from the side of the stage on a couple of occasions, and his on-stage sound is incredible.

I do need to loosen up a bit, and that usually does come with old age. That's the intention.

Ownership and control is important, because if you don't own what you do, all sorts of stupid stuff happens to it, and people spend good money on garbage.

When I was a teenager, I learned that in order to play guitar like Johnny Ramone, it takes a huge amount of physical effort.

A lot of people at my school could play the "Stairway to Heaven" guitar solo, but they couldn't play three chords of a Ramones song if their life depended on it because they didn't have the strength or ability to do it. But all I did was practice that, and the style that I eventually fell into is more focused than people would actually imagine.

I don't feel bound by the ebbs and flows of musical trends, or what's happening with new music in general. I always had a fascination with that sound. It's a mixture of the idea that something could be going wrong along with the idea of bending constrained, Westernized music out of tune. But because I wasn't copying an idea, and it just came from somewhere inside me, it felt like a birth of something that most people didn't understand at the time.