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.

I'm not too sure if I have a very smart approach to revealing my life. Luckily, I doubt if many people really care about my life that much.

At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

I write songs by sitting around in bars, so drinking songs are a little obvious. It's surprising that I don't write entirely drinking songs, since I am, in fact, drinking while writing the song. Drinking and love are the two principal sources of pleasure outside of music. There's only so many sources of pleasure, really. That's about it. Well, there are other arts as well. But none of them are as pleasurable as music, on a physical level.

You know, most love songs are not cheesy and corny. Most love songs are complaints, I think. Or about unrequited love, coming at it from some oblique angle. Only the ones that say "I love you" over and over are the cheesy, corny ones that people complain about

I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

If the songs were in lumps, then you would expect to understand what was going on in the plot. Which is not a realistic goal. And also the instrumentation is different for every show, so it's more varied sonically. And people are free to make up their own plots, of course. There are pretty dense and complicated plots, and they're simple songs.