It's not really a conscious decision to do a quiet album or a noisier album. It's just something that happens, I guess.

If you want to do a movie about aliens coming down to Earth nowadays, you need to do it with a smile. When Tim Burton did Mars Attacks, he tried to make it a little bit kitschy, because it's not scary for people anymore. It's not scary that birds will attack you anymore, but I'm sure it was when Alfred Hitchcock made it. And it still is when you watch it.

I like to get everything done during the early morning hours and the early part of the day.

I wanted to do an album that was very simple and very minimal in the context of instrumentation and stuff. I wanted to use as few means as possible to create a very powerful and interesting sound that would breathe.

This is the life I live, and this is the stuff I experience. And like any good writer, I should just write about what goes in my life and what goes on around me. So that's what I chose to do.

I guess my life was in a pretty disorderly fashion, so I think the music came out that way a little bit.

We started out with a lot of bands in the same generation as ours, and there are very few left. Mainly, I think people get into it for the wrong reasons. They either want fame or the girls. I think music has to be a fun experience, but it also needs to be in your blood. I firmly believe I was born to write beautiful music, and that's what I do, and that's why I don't do anything else, because I have no interest and no passion for it.