Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

There are only so many instruments you can layer on top of each other that aren't perfectly electronically programmed. "Long Vermont Roads" just cannot be performed live, because it's just too cluttered if it's played by humans. Synthesizers stay out of each other's way in a way that hand-played instruments never can.

I gave up music criticism because of the increasingly obvious conflict of interest. I couldn't say anything bad about the records when I might be meeting that person's manager backstage an hour later.

Surf is that music which is entirely about evoking something. There's never any vocals, so it's not about the lyrics, it's about the reverb.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

Well, things hold up even if they sound dated. It can be very difficult to listen to 80s pop songs with really, really gigantic smashed drum sounds. You just want to turn that gated reverb down on the snare. It sounds wrong now. It sounds amateurish. And ugly. But at the time it sounded state-of-the-art. So yeah, I think it's important not to sound state-of-the-art in a way that anybody else is going to sound. Or you'll quickly sound like yesterday's state-of-the-art.

Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.