I'm not an anti-online person. I get what the modern world's about and I understand that that's the nature of music dissemination.

I've always thought that each album would be my last one, and then I would be out of ideas and I would move to photography or something. I thought it was transient and it's not because of this entrenched career stubbornness that I've done it for so long, it's just something I enjoy doing, and it's the most direct way I can express something.

I don't feel like music is getting more intense; I think generally the channel for deeper harmonic saturation is not just a sine wave - but a really crunched sine wave. The trend in music is towards a harmonic saturation. I wouldn't say I'm reacting against that. It's just a personal choice to move into some weird space. This also allows me breathing room in the future. It just felt like the right thing to step back on.

I've got Ph.D. just because I enjoyed reading and writing and didn't know what else to do. It was something fun to do. Like it seems self-evident that I'm a musician now, but it's a really hard path. It's almost impossible.

You have to make rough decisions with sequencing and work within the limitations of having good audio for 15 minutes on a vinyl side.

I'm really sensitive to the beginning of a motif or a phrase or something that's kind of the backbone or becomes kind of the spine that you grow muscle tissue onto. You know from that, if you have that good beginning, it's like everything that grows off it often has potential. Maybe I'm good at that early bit of recognition of pieces of potential. I'm not sure.

You start to think, when you're finishing a record, in twelve- to fourteen-minute chunks. At a certain point, you do write to the format. It's not a coincidence that most albums are between thirty-five and fifty minutes. It's kind of like the 98-minute film. It becomes some paradigm for human attention in the media.