When I walk around New York now, there are so many ghosts. I find it very uncomfortable. There were many hard years, and I never really achieved any kind of comfortable financial success, so I just associate it with struggle. When I had a chance to get out, I was elated.

You make your work and you can't ask for approval when you're doing it. Otherwise, it's going to be untruthful in some way.

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

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.

I don't want to sound like everybody else.

I'm a producer in the old-school way - not just some slacker working on Pro Tools.

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.