I was never a kid who dreamt of being a performer. I started singing the songs because nobody knew who I was or cared at all. If I wasn't going to sing them, nobody was going to sing them, so I had to step in and fill that role myself.

I think that anything is a form of folk music. That's just me being glib, but the thing I like the best about humans, and there are not many other things besides this, is that humans make culture. If you're an artist, a big part of folk is noticing what other people are doing and incorporating it and changing it - the way that songs warp and change over time.

When people downloading records for free you start to think, "Is it worth spending all this money to make a record sound good, especially if it's going to end up as an mp3?" But I can't drive myself too crazy thinking about that. On one level, being involved in art is all a quixotic thing to begin with.

I have complicated feelings about nostalgia. I think that sometimes it can be dangerous. It can airbrush the truth, or fictionalize the truth, which leads to the worst kind of sentimentality. But I'm also a sentimental person who feels quite a bit of nostalgia.

There is a definite difference between live shows and the recordings. The recordings are for all time, hopefully, so you do want to bring across layers of subtlety. But the live show is this primal experience that everybody's having at the same time, that the recording can at best try to imitate or duplicate.

If I'm working on a set of songs, and thinking about putting them together in a collection, I start to think about what they have in common. Either on purpose or without meaning to, I shape them all in the same kind of way, because I'd rather the album feel like a galaxy of things that all have to do with each other. I do that with sonic elements, too - it's a matter of each record having its own specific identity.

You have to pretend that you're not bothered by your record leaked early. So that's the tack that I'm taking. It's like if you're working in a store and people come and openly shoplift from you, and you're not allowed to say anything about it. Instead, you're supposed to smile and go, "Hope you enjoy that!" I'm not going to complain about it, I don't get to make the rules. It's just really funny how that works.