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.

When I was a kid, I would go to the record store, where there was a bin of things they didn't know quite how to classify. Those were my choices. That's where you would find Captain Beefheart or an early electronic album.

Personally Im very happy to be behind the scenes. I like collaboration, I like working with directors.

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.

I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day.

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.

With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.