If someone listens to our music, and it makes them creative, that makes me happier than anything. But with our music, we try to teach the masses of fans that not everything is as it seems.

Creativity is an interesting thing…You can sit back, have a glass of wine, watch some television…and get a terrific idea of what you want to do…The great thing about being at home is that as soon as you get an idea you can put a mike at the piano and record it. That way you don’t lose the vibes, and you don’t have to worry about finishing before the studio’s next booking arrives…”

The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.

When we were first playing, even though it was derivative, playing music was the best, there was nothing better. And then by the second album (Freak Show) we were like, playing music makes me angry, and by the third album (Neon Ballroom) I was like, I need to play music cos life sucks. And now all of a sudden there's this really youthful enthusiasm in the band, everyone around us, there's this real positivity and everyone's vibing off the music.

Collective music making... may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts...

We were just wanting to make something new, and fresh, and exciting, and healing that was going to be able to, you know, help heal our fans and help heal us because we were both going through situations that were mentally challenging. This was our place where we can let our superhero versions of ourselves shine and create the things we express and share with the world, which was our music.

...So when you play five notes, if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learned from this very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that the creativity only work in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this, but I think that this is a not unimportant factor. And maybe in a strange way I've found some answers to all this, not in music but in philosophy, especially from reading regularly and for many years the Ethics of Spinoza. Spinoza was a religious scholar, a political architect, a philosopher, who aspired to geometric demonstration of the universe and the human being in it, and he was a biological thinker who advanced the science of emotion. And there lies of course one of the great difficulties of making music, the science of emotion.