At a certain age, children are total Id - they're anything but beautiful little flowers. That always interests me. The place where the ego and the superego start, and where guilt and socialization and morality takes place, the true root of it.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

The music takes you. It has to be alive. It's like you hammer something, and the way it happens to bleed leads you into new directions.

You find ways to push yourself into the sound through repetition. It doesn't stay the same. It morphs constantly.

I could never release something on the label I didn't personally love. The label's really an extension of my own musical career, and I'm intensely involved with every aspect personally, so it'd be a betrayal to myself if I released something simply because I thought it would make money.

When I first started doing the quieter, more acoustic material in Swans, there was a lot of derision and outright hatred from the audience and press, just as in the early days of Swans when we were rejected outright because of the bludgeoning, single-minded violence of the music.

I don't want to sound like everybody else.