If you want to write a love song, you need to not try to write it for a particular person in a particular situation. It needs to be vague, otherwise you're going to fall into trap after trap of trying to rhyme with somebody's name. Keep it vague.

I would say that the evocative qualities of music are usually put there in post-production in the reverb. It's really not much about the musicians as the engineering. It's post-production that's being done by the musician at the time.

When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, "Uh, I love you." And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

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.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

There's already a great deal to do writing the songs. And if I were completely in control of it, nobody would be able to say "this song doesn't work."

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.