Our job is to represent the truth of human nature whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers ' which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.

Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A. but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.

We're real people and we're a band that's been playing on the scene for a long time. We've made a lot of friends and one enemy we've always had was the NME. They've always basically slated us and they've basically never ever written about the music.

Music is a language and different people who come along are each using that language to do something different but all coming at it in a similar vein inasmuch as it's always community based and for the most part nonprofit. Most bands don't ever come within a mile of profit - clearly these people are not playing music to make money.

I know that I can sing. That's the reason I started playing music when I was twelve years old.

I can play punk rock and I love playing punk rock but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I'm prepared to spend the rest of my life playing clubs if that means I'm playing music that I believe in.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself in a sense in the mid 1960s really when I first heard composers like Terry Riley and when I first started playing with tape recorders.