I'm f**king pathetic when it comes to being an entertainer. People come because they want to see me have a nervous breakdown.
Mark LinkousA lot of that I base on, "Is it still going to sound interesting and fresh to me in five years, am I going to be embarrassed by this in five years?" It's easier for me to do stark, moody, pretty stuff, and I have all this pop stuff inside me, but it's a lot more dangerous, and pop is just apt to sound contrived and sort of pedestrian if you're not careful.
Mark LinkousI've been trying to write really simple songs to make them sound like they're coming out of a satellite that's crashing into a gas giant or something.
Mark LinkousI hate the sound of my own voice. It's just up there, sort of naked and exposed. Live is hard, because on my records, I play almost everything on a lot of stuff. In a live situation, I can't control everything. I use two different microphones. One is just clean, traditional sound, and the other one is basically a cheap cassette-recorder microphone that goes through a distortion box to emulate my voice on the record. That helps some.
Mark Linkous