I joined Facebook purely so I could play online Scrabble. You have eight tiles instead of seven, so you tend to have higher scores. I'm somewhere between 400 and 500.

What sounds good on the radio is really loud kick drums and loud snare drums, when everything's bombastic and in your face. It's the equivalent of a houseguest who screams all the time.

I walk out my front door in New York and I'm out on the street and there are people everywhere. L.A. is so much more spread out, so it's really easy in L.A. to have a little more isolation and to just not see as many people.

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was fit in, but if you're perpetually an outsider, it gives you a perspective that might have a little more objectivity than people who really feel connected to their social environment in which they grow up.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.