“A lot of people have reunion things, but I think bands are supposed to break up.”

Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart – you don’t think about them as bands; they’re just the soundtrack of your life.

I probably couldn’t have the same experience listening to that song because I’m self-conscious about some of my singing parts.

Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.

Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don’t really believe it. It’s as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.

If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.

Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I’m in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it’s the rare band that doesn’t, like, turn into something else.

It’s insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, “You could run off with me right now!” I’m like, “It’s cool, I think I’m gonna go read.”

Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there’s more than 808s in the universe.

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.

You can physically move yourself around but there’s that great line that Adam wrote: “Does it define for life, like print of thumb?” I think it does.

When I’m in the mode of feeling positive about love, I don’t really feel the need to mark it down in song. In fact, I know what that song would sound like, and I would not subject anybody to that.

I don’t want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I’m doing.

Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it’s overcompensating for something missing in the song’s structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it’s never like an assault.

Adam is one of my favourite writers, period. He has such a unique voice and he’s somebody who I admire so much for putting the effort into inventing his own language and furthering it.

I think that music and art and film, at their best, can connect with something that is eternal in human beings, that might not have so many labels on it, something that’s ultimately universal and that may just be a feeling.

There’s no real template to follow these days for what a band should and shouldn’t be – bands are just becoming these weird little Internet avatars that you either follow or download or interact with in some removed way.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

There is nothing in art, in philosophy, or in politics to match the fervor of mutual cooperation among discordant bands of fanatics.

But the live band is now becoming ancient history in Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma.

And there are places on the border, such as the Arizona desert or the open terrain around the Big Bend in South Texas, where Mother Nature has created her own barrier that is not easily passable. Or if you do pass through it, you are easily detected.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Buy our album, were Nirvana, a garage band from Seattle. Well, it sure beats raising cattle.

One of my pet peeves is that sometimes the talents of my band get overlooked because, and it was the same problem that Frank Zappa had, with a lot of groups that use humor, people don’t realize there’s a lot of craft behind the comedy.