I gave up music criticism because of the increasingly obvious conflict of interest. I couldn't say anything bad about the records when I might be meeting that person's manager backstage an hour later.

I think there is such a valid concept as serious music, meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

Well, there are certainly original things to say. But I'm not sure that a pop song is the appropriate format to say them in.

Surf is that music which is entirely about evoking something. There's never any vocals, so it's not about the lyrics, it's about the reverb.

I would say that the evocative qualities of music are usually put there in post-production in the reverb. It's really not much about the musicians as the engineering. It's post-production that's being done by the musician at the time.

Well, hardcore is so much about the body, in that you have to play as fast as possible. I'm not sure it can be ironized. You can't play faster, though I suppose that with the help of electronics you could play faster. Yeah, if you sped it up, that could ironize it.

If you want to write a love song, you need to not try to write it for a particular person in a particular situation. It needs to be vague, otherwise you're going to fall into trap after trap of trying to rhyme with somebody's name. Keep it vague.

That seems like one of the differences in expectations of serious and popular music that you can actually depend on the liner notes to explain yourself? Yeah. Whereas in popular music you depend on photo shoots. A hardcore band who looked like Duran Duran would have to depend upon those liner notes.

I'm not too sure if I have a very smart approach to revealing my life. Luckily, I doubt if many people really care about my life that much.

When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, Uh, I love you. And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

There's already a great deal to do writing the songs. And if I were completely in control of it, nobody would be able to say this song doesn't work.

My mother was into folk-rock when I was little, so I think of folk-rock as the norm from which everything else deviates. Of course, that's completely preposterous, but that's how I grew up. What is the norm by which to judge wordiness? I think I'm less wordy than Madonna.

If the songs were in lumps, then you would expect to understand what was going on in the plot. Which is not a realistic goal. And also the instrumentation is different for every show, so it's more varied sonically. And people are free to make up their own plots, of course. There are pretty dense and complicated plots, and they're simple songs.

There are so many clichés in the world, especially in music, that it's a never-ending creative font to just bring two of them together and let them interact.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.