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It's not until I hear songs that I've done, that I realize how much of an inspiration music from the '60s and '70s has been.

I get most of my inspiration from older records. Most of the records that I listen to were probably made before I was born, and I was born in the mid-'70s. I don't know why, exactly, I'm drawn to those sounds.

I have a pretty healthy perspective on what my past music was.

Through the years I've found that I prefer live playing to recording. I still do lots of recording - but I treasure the live shows.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

I'm making music the way I would have done before modern equipment and music recording.

When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s.

If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances.

I've always made music that was representative of real life.

Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.