Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.

I live and die by puns.

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’ve always been a bit wary of keyboards because there’s an invisibility to it – you’re not really hitting anything.

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.

I was in a crazy, private, awesome bubble again, and that’s when I started to write.

I guess there are a lot of people out there that think they’re supposed to define themselves in isolation, but that’s not necessarily the case.

Because there’s just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don’t try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

I said I’d stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn’t gotten my land legs back at all.

I don’t think that village idea of actually knowing what you’re contributing to the whole exists anymore.