Never try to do anything artistic when you're feeling something overwhelming. It's like driving a car: If you're experiencing road rage, pull over.

I actually prefer to hear small groups of instruments. Orchestras seem to lack a texture for me, or variety of texture. There's only about ten things you can do with one note in a string section. But a lone violin is continuously changing textures.

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.

If you start out with a song sounding like Britney Spears, and you end up with a song sounding like Pauline Oliveros, you'd better have pretty good liner notes explaining what on earth you mean.

I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

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.

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.