Quotes

I've never really had the desire to be a front person or a solo artist. I don't really create that much of a hierarchy in my mind.

I just like to stay busy, and I like to work with interesting people.

Making your own records is really satisfying in the sense that you more or less get to do what you want. It may not sell or whatever, but on an artistic level, the only people that you really have to fight with are the people in your own band.

With Fountains of Wayne, after 'Stacy's Mom' happened, we started making a little bit more money and getting a little bit more known.

I had a job transcribing a biotechnology-litigation seminar. You put headphones on and fast-forward and stop with your feet. There were a lot of 'um's.'

In promotional mode, every day is a series of decisions. You can easily fill up your day with checklist stuff.

A song sometimes ends up with its own internal logic.

Most of your day is spent working, and being in a band is no different. We're just business travelers in a way.

Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful - and definitely enough to keep doing more.

Every year, there's some band that plays guitar-oriented pop music that has a single, but for the most part, it's kind of relegated to the sidelines.

I usually start with a lyric and see where that takes me.

For me, it's just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while.

A band can define their own success.

If you're sitting in a place like Martha's Vineyard, I don't think you're going to write a song about a ski resort.

Andy Chase and I were keyboard players originally, and we became guitarists later. But it's fun for us to focus more on the keyboard stuff sometimes.

I always have to be thinking about who's going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don't sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever.

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.

What should a song be about? It's a trick question for songwriters because lots of amazing songs aren't 'about' anything. Or, at least, they're not about anything that's obvious or logical.

I tend to write songs that are about something pretty specific. A lot of them tell some kind of little made-up story.

I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn't want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

In the '80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn't really figured out how it worked yet... You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are forced to play in something called the 'Quicken Loans Arena.' This is a terrible name for a sports venue.

Scotland is a picturesque country where the people are friendly yet completely incomprehensible. Also, the national delicacy is a sheep's stomach filled with its liver, lungs, and heart.

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap.