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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

My mother was into folk-rock when I was little, so I think of folk-rock as the norm from which everything else deviates. Of course, that's completely preposterous, but that's how I grew up. What is the norm by which to judge wordiness? I think I'm less wordy than Madonna.