Songs sung under duress are often very powerful.

Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me - the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.

One of the nice things about a favorite pop song is that it's an unconditional truce on judgment and musical snobbery. You like the song because you just do, and there need not be any further criticism.

I do a lot of stuff for free anyway. Like a lot of people who you see who don't need money. Mick Jagger - he needs money? He just likes to go sing Satisfaction every night. If I wrote that song I probably would do it too.

Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.

Bands have always written songs against what they see as wrong. Ronald Reagan really made for a lot of songs.

The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.

I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.

I don't cuss in songs. It's too easy.