“There’s enough people that do unfunny music. I’ll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.”

About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they’re not all good!

My brothers and sisters hated me because I was an only child.

Not only are they just great, nice guys; they’re some of the best musicians you’re likely to find.

So then why get upset if somebody like me Tries to look at the world just a bit differently?

What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist’s performance on whether or not they had a good seat?

In fact, when I come up with an idea for a parody I try to resist the urge to Google the idea to see if someone has done it already because the answer is almost always, “Yes, of course they have, they’ve thought of it!”

People say releasing an album is like giving birth, but it’s more like having a gallbladder operation.

I’m very analytical, I’m very precise.

I think that was the genesis of my polka medleys, because every rock song I played on the accordion just sounded like a polka and my friends thought it was funny.

Midget wrestling on channel 3, it costs me 50 bucks a month.

I like the guitar-driven music of Nirvana at its peak. At that point, I thought there was a lot of really exciting music coming out.

And then I’ll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

I’m a music fan, and I can listen to the radio, or music, without thinking, “How am I going to screw this up?” [Laughs] If I’m really actively trying to think of a parody, then I’ll have my antenna out, and be a little more proactive about it.

If I could find the right kind of property, get tied in with the right movie, I’d love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right now.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career.

I would like to, especially in film, play against type and do some heavier stuff. I’m intrigued by projects that deal with problematic people and things.

Retiring is a strange word. I’m 27 years old. I’ve still got stuff to do.

The romantic stuff comes a lot easier when you’re experiencing true love. It feels better, it feels more natural to record love songs when you’re in love.

Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren’t enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.

I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.

I think by eighth grade I knew I wanted to be an actor. I’d done church plays and stuff, but my first actual acting class was in eighth grade. I was obsessed with it.

Companies should be selling ideas more than benefits. Sell ideas. Not stuff.

The stuff that I write doesn’t work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.