Mustard Quotes

I really had a great time working with 'Modest Mouse,' just because of the people. I loved writing songs with Isaac Brock, and Jeremiah Green is probably my favorite musician that I've worked with.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.

The studio is really fun because I don't make it into the studio unless I've got something I really like. I love working with different musicians in the studio; that's a real joy, working with someone for the first time.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

'Cruise Control' was the first track me and Wiz Khalifa ever did. I made the beat on that, and I played guitar on it.

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

Whenever I go into the studio, I'm like, 'Guys, we're probably not going to get an uptempo out of this!'

People will go through 50 beats from a producer and pick the best ones, go make a song on that beat. That's cool, but someone coming to me and hearing what I've been working on, picking out pieces of all of that, and then adding some of their own ideas is way more exciting.

My approach to making music has always been making ideas and developing them. Sometimes I develop them all the way by myself. The other part of development is I will work with my friends who are just some of the best producers in the world, give them an idea.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

I just do what I do. I like to make music.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.

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.

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.