That seems like one of the differences in expectations of "serious" and "popular" music that you can actually depend on the liner notes to explain yourself? Yeah. Whereas in popular music you depend on photo shoots. A hardcore band who looked like Duran Duran would have to depend upon those liner notes.

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.

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 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.

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.

Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.

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.