In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.

What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. I think that's sort of a characteristic of the way I've worked ever since I started.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.

Why blow money on a tour bus when you could get your mom a nice dress?

I've never read 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe,' but his later works are about whether God is real.

When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you've got to have your story together. You've got to study and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation, and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He's got an understanding that you don't hear that often.

You get a realisation at some point in your career that whatever it is you do, you can no longer continue to do it. You just realise you can't put out the same records forever.

On the road, we watch 'The Mighty Boosh.' We have so many copies, we have them in different country codes.

My friend Danny Clinch, who's a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It's hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They're all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, 'Don't sell out!'

For me, there's no point in being an artist and putting yourself out there if you're not going to really put yourself out there.

I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK.

Fans look up to us, and that's creepy.

The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that.

I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem.

We didn't invent this - this rock n' roll thing.

Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.

You can learn a lot if you become a student of what's happening to you.

There can be a wrong time - it's happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.

Songs are like anything else - they dictate to you which ones go together and which ones don't.

Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

There's no way I'm going to write for other people.

I don't mean it egotistically, but I've been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it's part of my job and my duty - especially where I'm from - to speak the language of the people I'm around and speak for them.

With 'Get Hurt,' we wanted to see where else we could go with the band. We thought it was time to change things up a bit. The song itself is similar to the feeling of a wreck you see coming, but long past the point you can avoid it.

One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.

I'll probably continue to write about heartbreak forever. That stuff doesn't go away as you get older.

You're always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.

I can't really see myself writing about politics because I'm not really into it, and one of the worst things you can do is write about things you're not into.

It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.

There's never going to be a new Beatles because we don't consume things in that way anymore.

When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.

People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.

Everyone always says, 'We don't want to be pigeonholed.' But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.

At the end of the day, you can't reinvent yourself past a point, because you are you, and there are things that are inherently you that are always going to be there.

I think Green Day's 'American Idiot' is probably the best comeback or mid-career record that any band has done.

I don't have a 'Born to Run' in me.

I'm one of those people who, even if I'm invited somewhere, I still kinda feel like I'm not supposed to be there.

I'm on the phone with this guy, and he says to me, 'People compare you to Bruce Springsteen. I don't think you've written a song as good as 'Dancing in the Dark' or 'I'm on Fire.'' And all I could think was, 'Me neither!'