I don't sleep very well when I travel. And as a result, I tend to be awake in cities when everyone else is asleep.

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.

Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.

For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.Then you go to an anti-immigration website chat room and ask, "What's all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?"

As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of making music is to get it heard by as many people as possible.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

I sort of use as my guiding principle that show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whenever possible, do the stupid thing.