"I could write a book on the third Peter Gabriel record. I think that record is a pretty marvelous document of a lot of different things. But I feel like even now, I'm still trying to figure out how to make that record—like, Songs From The Big Chair, the Tears For Fears record, that record is a song for song call and response to the Peter Gabriel record. Every song on that record, song for song, has a corresponding song. 'Shout' is totally a 'Games Without Frontiers.' And the little sax intro before 'The Working Hour' is the little sax intro before 'Start.' 'Mother's Talk' isn't too far from 'I Don't Remember.'

          "That's my record. I love the fact that there's not a cymbal on that record, not a single crash cymbal, all the space that band takes up is all room filled up with guitars and orchestration, all those guys who are textural masters, and all those great drum sounds. All that stuff that matches his personality in the sonic world is so much able to happen because there aren't any cymbals. I really like that. I'm always trying to encourage bands to embrace that model. I can get Jason to do it sometimes....

          "Like, there's only one cymbal crash on 'Soul Meets Body,' which I really like. I'm really proud of how that song turned out. There's some things about the mix in kind of just 'I'm the producer who worked on it' sort of terms that I don't like ... but I still want to hear it, and I still like listening to it. When I was working on it, I couldn't wait to get back to the beginning of the song to hit play so I could print it. That is always what I want when I'm working on a record, [to] get to that point where the repeat, repeat, repeat factor is working. If you get to that point where you want to hit stop, and you want to stop and go eat lunch, it's sucking! You've got to figure it out, it's not working. That's a big alarm bell, when you go, 'Let's work on something else.' That's wrong. It's a record, you want it to live in somebody's record collection or I-Pod or whatever forever and if you can't even listen to it six times in a row, then it's bad, it shouldn't go on your record.

          "I want the records I work on to be living, dynamic, I want them to be something that can be listened to at any point in your life, at any turn. That's how my favorite records are, they make you feel amazing when you're feeling great, when you can rock out in the car, and when you're feeling bad or down, or whatever, there's something about them then as well."