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.

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.

I like loud electric guitars because I like how you can just lose your entire being in the sound. But I can't find myself in a situation where our band Swans is doing typical chord progressions - it just seems cliché to me. Even changing chords sounds like a cliché sometimes, though it happens occasionally in our music. But 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.

Playing an old record doesn't interest me at all. It's exactly the opposite of what I want to do.

Many of the songs were written as a way of paying tribute to specific people, but in the end the songs took on a life of their own and I didn't worry about accuracy or biographical truth, so it's not a problem.

I'm more interested in pulling out strands of joy from both myself and the audience. I'm not saying the music or songs are "light," just that when they're performed with the correct commitment it's a source of real pleasure, for me anyway.