Before MTV, if you put out an album that sold 50,000 copies, your band could afford not to have day jobs for a while. That meant you could stick around, put out another album or two. Maybe it would be the second or third album where you'd make the statement you'd been trying to make all along.

If you're in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then I probably don't like your music to begin with.

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film.

I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities.

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?"

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

TV series, there's a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they're on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows.