I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.
I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.
I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.
We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.
The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing.
If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.
As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.
Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.
There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts.
Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.
Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.
Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.
You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you'll start walking pretty weird.
When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.