Feist

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.

When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.

Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.

There's no mystery any more. So my instinct is to show very little, because there's much too much information about everyone, everywhere right now. Reality TV is an example of that.

On the videos for '1234' and 'My Moon My Man' I wanted to make the songs visible. And, really, what way can you make sound visible other than good old naive dancing? I was working with a choreographer, but I'm not a dancer. Any notion of elegance is impossible with me.

Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.

And of course, pop music is all about memorability and simplicity and positive messages and a little dash of joy.

So, I'm on 'Sesame Street,' walking around with all these monsters, Elmo and his buddies, a whole bunch of chickens, a whole bunch of penguins and a number four dancing about. It was just pure joy, simple, ridiculous fun, stupid joy. There's no irony. 'Sesame Street' is just a crazy great place to be.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'll change its meaning. It's something I wrote but it changed because I did.

The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.

I've not really spent much time in proper studios. The room itself where you're recording, and how you live while you're there is what appeals to me.