When I started the band, the name 'Silver Jews' had no literal meaning - it was just an abstraction.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt un-trusted.

People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I'm up to something. And I've often felt this.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.