As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.

We are shocked and saddened by Bob Casale's passing. He not only was integral in DEVO's sound, he worked over twenty years at Mutato, collaborating with me on sixty or seventy films and television shows, not to mention countless commercials and many video games. Bob was instrumental in creating the sound of projects as varied as Rugrats and Wes Anderson's films. He was a great friend. I will miss him greatly.

When I'm writing a theme song for a TV show I always think, "What would be Pavlovian where a kid would be in the kitchen, or an adult would be in the kitchen, and they hear the theme song come on and it would draw them back to the other room so that they would watch the show?"

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.

My major was Fine Arts and Education thinking I would become an Art Teacher. I couldn't visualize myself as an art teacher, thinking how it wouldn't work.

With vinyl you had twenty-two minutes per side. CDs came along, and you had sixty, seventy, eighty minutes and people felt like they had to fill them up. They were like those Fuji apples from Japan. They look like perfect, super-gigantic versions of American apples.