It's so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich.

I think - I think the real nightmare place now is less Afghanistan than it is Pakistan. I mean, again, Pakistan is this gigantic country, deeply troubled, kind of almost ungovernable, sitting on top of probably 50 or 60 nuclear warheads. Nobody really knows where the warheads are; the Americans certainly don't know where they are.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

Self-discovery is so important in identity processing: who you hang out with, what clothes you wear, what shows you see. As a kid, I found out about things through friends. I would go to hardcore shows with 50 people.

It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.