John Martin was a great, complex folk singer, and later on, his music became more and more melancholic as he went through a separation with his wife.

To me, 'Garden of Delete' is a way of describing the idea that good things can bloom out of a negative situation. All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever.

I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That's always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.

I'm down for indefinitely chilling as long as I'm not self-aware during it. That seems like it could be torture on some level but a lot of people pray for that so who knows.

I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work.

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

I've made my most horrible inhuman tendencies work for me.

I'm like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.

We had a band called the Grainers. In our 12-year-old minds, this was like a double entendre for like being annoying and being a delicious donut. I got kicked out of the band for playing bass incorrectly. Like, I was playing it like a guitar. I was just so like twee and British, even as like the little 12-year-old boy.

I had it calcified inside me that that was the ultimate state of composing. Being Brian Wilson. Being simultaneously a genius and sort of lost at sea - not really knowing what you're doing but reaching for the stars.

It's stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I've solved that problem I'm not going to feel like I've achieved too much.

I was never totally sold on this idea that I'm just a musician. I wanted to be the Tim Burton of music.

I just like cliches. I like tvtropes.com. It's pretty much my bible.

The promotional cycle's this staging area for failure. I hate it! Why bother when everyone's either gonna steal the album or copy it?

Yeah it would be really cool to disappear. Like Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger.' Isn't that the final frontier? Being able to erase everything everyone knows about you and just be a stranger has become extremely seductive.

All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.

The thing that I've always been a little bit jealous of is a complete, a total giving to one form, like a genre, and just a mastery of it. My thing is very different. It's a complete embrace of something, but I've never been able to say, 'I believe in this.' The only thing I believe in is that I'm in this perpetual state of disbelief.

Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is... it's the scene with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first 'Batman,' the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.

Games isn't really pop music, and neither is OPN. Both are part of the same ecosystem and both deal with exploring the undercurrents of pop music.

Games is like hardwired plumbing in the house of pop. It's not pop itself, its sort of like the behind-the-scenes arteries and capillaries of pop music.

It's not like I actually understand the properties of sound.

My friend and I were in a band together and we used to always refer it it as 'floor-core,' meaning that we would sit on the floor and play stuff.

There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.

That's a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: 'Hey, isn't it something that's in bad taste?'