Musician

I've not really spent much time in proper studios. The room itself where you're recording, and how you live while you're there is what appeals to me.

The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.

Something that I think I figured out slowly was if you're playing a show and there's a chatter or there is, you know, a lot of noise - people talking or something - I was never the one whose instinct was to try to be louder than them.

Musically, I didn't relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there - I don't think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.

Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene it's not one-on-one, it's a one-on-12. It's very healthy, very comfortable, like a big pot luck supper among old friends.

I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

There's nothing better than not knowing what's going to happen until you put the pieces together.

The idea of having one ensemble do everything is what was on 'Sea Lion' and that's what I tried to make happen for 'Metals,' which is having five people in the room and all of us contributing equally to every arrangement and every song.

I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.

After 'Sesame Street,' it's a hyper-familiar world to me and I have this childlike ability to ignore the fact that I'm talking to scraps of cloth. Every country I go to, I see posters promoting the film in different languages. 'Los Muppets' - I love that!

'Gatekeeper' was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I haven't written many like that.

On the videos for '1234' and 'My Moon My Man' I wanted to make the songs visible. And, really, what way can you make sound visible other than good old naive dancing? I was working with a choreographer, but I'm not a dancer. Any notion of elegance is impossible with me.

Since I was 19, I've always gone where there was a reason to be. Maybe I'll be lucky and there'll be a reason to go somewhere tropical for a while.

For me, music is in the choice of what not to play as much as in what you've chosen to play.

When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.

When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's almost like casting spells. I don't mean necessarily in the flighty, 'I'm going to go buy a cloak with a hood now' way.

I'd been touring for so long, seven years. For a year and a half I'd just been curious about what it was like not to tour. It's like if you were to lift a 100-pound barbell with your right arm for seven years, eventually you'd get really curious about what your left arm was capable of.

Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.

'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again.

I get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now.