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.

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.

Musically, I just think in terms of what's next. There's a lot of things I've always dreamed of doing, and I hope I get to them before I get too deaf.

I wasn't making music for the sake of music but rather making music in the context of other music. At the same time, it doesn't mean I'm not going to try and do that some day.

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.

Oftentimes, when people cut a record from analog tape to vinyl, they digitize the music first; I did a little investigating and discovered that most vinyl records that I've ever heard were digitized before they were put onto vinyl.

In reality, there's a limit to putting a record out yourself. When it comes to working with major record companies in the context of them owning anything, though, that will never happen. Ever. In my life.