Give death a better name or die trying.
Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.
I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there.
I moved to Portland because Modest Mouse is there. I didn't necessarily mean to live there permanently, but I've got a really good feeling for it. The sensibility there really suits me. I happened to have grown up in Manchester, a city that was a pretty cool place to be a musician. It's close to Portland in a lot of ways.
In the earlier part of the 90s, I was really hell-bent on discovering how new technology works and how to make records entirely without a producer, which isn't necessarily what fans wanted. But I had to do it because I felt it was in my destiny or whatever.
I think some musicians can almost forget that the stage is something to do something on, even if that thing is standing still.
Growing up in public is a test, and not many people know how to do it.
Change is the investor's only certainty.
Take good care of your employees, and they'll take good care of your customers, and the customers will come back.
It's all gravy when everything's great, but if there comes a point where there's a problem, as with any kind of relationship you need to fix it. There's always going to be something, and it could be the smallest detail you'd never have expected or it could be something substantial, but it's how you deal with things.
It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being. It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.