You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.

I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

For his sake I'm sorry that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, but for our sake and the sake of music I'm glad he did.

I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult.

I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.

I have to say that being a vegan in 1986 or whenever was a lot different than being a vegan in 2012. You'd go to health foods stores and basically your choice was between Mung beans and nutritional yeast, and that's about it.

In some of the greatest recordings ever made, the performance is a part of the recording. Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35' is all about the esthetic of that performance. You can hear the room.