In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.

My dad, Frank Addison Albini, was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didnt romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man.

I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.

I stopped drinking almost immediately after I had ready access to liquor, when I got to college. It almost immediately lost its appeal for me.