It wouldn't interest me to try to sound like Cop or something. It would be silly and soul-crushing.

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 went to art school and never thought I'd be a musician, but then punk rock came along in the late 70s and kind of ruined my life. So I quit art school to get involved in music and I've been doing it ever since.

It wouldn't interest me to try to sound like Cop or something. It would be silly and soul-crushing.

I like loud electric guitars because I like how you can just lose your entire being in the sound.

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.

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.