I just wanted to release an album of piano music for music's sake. I'm not expecting to sell millions of albums. It's was just nice to be able to sit down at an acoustic piano and make some music.

Everybody in the world has problems, and the nice thing about entertainment is you get to forget about those problems and have a good time for a couple of hours.

We're a bar band, so we know all the bar songs.

I think growing up in the shadow of New York shaped me for life. Hey, you come from Jersey, you get used to being dumped on by the big city.

I've been playing piano since I was 7. I took 15 years of lessons. I've got a lot of miles on these hands.

I grew up as one of the few Jews in Edison, and I had people tell me they hated me because of my religion.

When I was growing up, there was hate. I looked around and saw that it was so wrong. I got to go round the world with my rock band, and you can bring harmony.

Why would we want to do an experimental album? That's just selfish.

In times of joy and sorrow, love or hate, peace and unrest, music has always been an important outlet for expressing our emotions individually and as a nation.

A lot of my friends are doctors, and the difference between me and them is there's no musical emergencies to pull me away from dinner. 'I need the chords for that song right now!' No, it can wait.

I've been through a lot of experiences in my life being in the biggest band in the world.

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.

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.

I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.

A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.

I have this Martin electric/acoustic that's made of black formica. Really cool.

Mostly i write on an unplugged Mustang or a Baby Taylor.

There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.