Maybe I don't have the patience to make a virtue of necessity - the patience to carry something all the way through, and to actually say something. Lately, the songs are more jagged and they don't really lend themselves to that. I just take it one bit at a time.

We always did our own mixing.

Usually [the lyrics] go from one word to the next word - there's no finish line. The music was that way, too.

The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.

I don't want to be in Mötley Crüe or something.

You know, the songs that are self-conscious or jerky, they are that way, but the other ones aren't, so that's a good thing. Some of the songs are Beck-jokey, but the others, they have heart in them.

Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.