I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

The idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case.

When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam [Fogarino]. Greg [ex-drummer] is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."