I love people like Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks and David Bowie - people that project themselves as characters and that contextualizes the music.

If you have a lot of textural stuff happening in music you get called shoegaze, or whatever, and then it becomes about the sound and not about the songs.

My job is to file things! I'm not going to be like, "Mr. Jacobsen from Oakland, California" - just listing his problems, like a rap.

There's nothing more fun than feeling frequencies and learning about equipment - everybody should do that. But if you're going to put your heart into an album and you want to give it to the world and add to the conversation, I think it's really important to take your time.

It's really cool what you can do with a guitar and a Fender Twin and a space echo.

In the beginning I had a lot of self-imposed limitations as far as production and instrumentation. It was really inspiring for us at the time, because those limitations allowed us to push ourselves as songwriters and gave us a strong sound that people could recognize as ours, like wearing a leather jacket every day. A uniform. They know it's you - and that's great - but my original intention wasn't to be a shoegaze band or to be derivative of one sound.

I didn't want to make a record that's just drones or completely experimental. A lot of the time bands that make this psychedelic style of music are just a bunch of dudes hanging out together and jamming.