Daniel Johnston is the purist and most unpretentious artist of our generation

I 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.

When people want me to sign records they usually always have Vivadixie[submarinetransmissions], and I think that's a lot of people's favorite record. And that was sort of when I was just learning what I was doing.

I'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.

A 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.

I never really made much money playing music. It's because I've never really worked with a producer who could make my music sound, I guess, like how the public wants it to sound.

It takes me forever to write songs most of the time.