You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative

In an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.

I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

I would have issues with directions songs were taking, but I never heard one of Carlos' [Dangler] basslines and said, I don't like that, do something else. The same goes for the beat and the guitars. I think that's why we were able to make four albums together.

That's for non-musicians to say: I only listen to this or that type of music. I think musicians love all music, or at least that's my case.

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

The idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case.

Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate.

...It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.