I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.
I think anything that you can't poke fun at is a little too precious.
For a brief moment, I considered deconstructing the song and going down a cerebral road, but then I realized it would kill what is most powerful about it.
What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn't touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.
An mp3 is a compressed form of data. It's not the full spectrum. It's never going to sound as good as a record. I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time. CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression. Side one and side two? That's a product of vinyl. But that's not necessarily dramatic form - you could argue that that was three acts.
I think every time I play, every show is different, and I think that at a certain point a song isn't about you anymore. It's about the audience, it's about how the song has worked its way into other people's lives and that kind of keeps the meaning of the song new, because you see it reflected in other people every night.
I had brief glimpses of emotional catharsis while writing. I remember reading something Philip Roth wrote about how he writes every single day, but it's almost as if he has amnesia every morning - he has almost zero confidence that anything will come but he just sits down and plugs away. And at the end of the day it feels like a miracle: "How did I do that?" I had a similar experience where it was just about putting in the hours and being present.
I have the weirdest job. It's not every day that you get to stand up onstage and unload every ounce of your misanthropic bile onto a crowd of people, and they're like, "Cool! Hit us again!"
I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.
I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.
Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.
There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.
Checking voicemail is like, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" I'm always afraid it's going to be terrible news I don't want to hear.
I think cults are probably a little less scary. To me, it's scarier that 25 people would wear robes and jump up and down and try to convert everyone to happiness than a Kool-Aid suicide.
It's pretty amazing, someone having that kind of charisma - and it still happens in micro and macro forms - to convince a whole gaggle of people to kill themselves. Or put on robes and jump up and down. That takes a very charismatic leader.
