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I heard that, and I just realized that he was right. Creativity in and of itself is wonderful. But we live in this culture, especially in New York, L.A., London, where creative expression more often that not is judged on how much money it can generate, how much market share it commands. And I hate to say this, but living in New York, being surrounded by so much commerce, I found myself to some small extent buying into that idea that a record was only valid if it sold really well.

But after hearing David Lynch say that, I stopped to think, and I realized I grew up listening to very obscure, underground music, and when I was growing up, it never even dawned on me that good music would generate money; I thought that people got rich off of bad music, and if they made good music, they invariably had to have a day job. And that seemed to me like the natural order of things.

And then in the '90s, that all kind of changed. I mean, as much as I liked them, the success of Nirvana made it possible for idiosyncratic alternative musicians to get very wealthy. So I think that attracted a lot of people to the world of alternative music who otherwise wouldn't have gone in that direction.

It attracted the business itself.

Yeah. And punk rock and indie rock had just been left alone for the longest time, because no one was getting rich off of it. A band would put out a record and sell 10,000 to 20,000 copies, they'd play a show to 500 people, and they'd see it as just covering their expenses –– putting gas in the van. And that seemed a lot healthier. I don't want to sound like some crazy old lefty, but it's hard to make a case for money, fame and success actually improving the quality of someone's musical output.

Of course along that route the record industry itself got an inkling about the idea of people doing it their own way; certain kinds of radical music did develop markets, began to look a very attractive, marketable thing, and was exploited as such by the business.

To go back to the '60s, there were examples of really creative, idiosyncratic, interesting artists getting rich and selling a lot of records. Part of that was that they were signed to independent record labels, and they were given a lot of freedom to do whatever they wanted to do.

That changed a lot when all the major labels got bought up by big multinational corporations, and in turn the record labels suddenly had to report to these multinationals on a quarterly basis. You know, at Warner Bros., back in the day, as long as a record made money over a couple of years, everyone was pretty happy, I think. And then suddenly, when the labels became part of big corporations, they had to justify their expenses every three months. So if you had an artist who hadn't sold a lot of records in those three months, they got dropped or ignored. And it created a horrible climate for music.

Toward the end of the '90s was when music was at its most profitable; it's also when the fewest number of good records were being made. So records that were coming out, they're selling 10 million copies, and they're not very good.

Through all this, you've apparently been able to operate with a good amount of freedom in what you do.

Well, I got lucky, because I signed to Mute Records early on. Mute was an independent label, and I was left alone; [Mute founder] Daniel Miller would say, Oh, you're a musician, go make records, do whatever you want to do –– if you want to make a punk rock record, make a punk rock record; if you want to make a dance record, make a dance record; just do whatever you want to do.

And that freedom was great, but one of the things that enabled me that freedom was, I didn't sell many records. So I was just kind of left alone in my little middle-class musical ghetto. And then in 1999, the album Play became very successful, and then Mute was bought by EMI, so suddenly I found myself still on Mute but part of the EMI corporation, and then a lot of commercial pressure started creeping in.

And for me it came to a head when I put out this album in 2005 called Hotel. It's not a bad record, but it's the only record I've made that I'm not all that proud of, because I produced it in a very conventional, very professional way. I gotta take credit or blame for it myself, because, sure, EMI was putting some pressure on me –– I mean, they go to their artists and say, Look, if you deliver a commercial record, we'll work it; if you don't, we won't.

But I did make a more professional record, because I wanted to see if I could make a record in a big studio, with professional engineers, and I ended up with a very competent record that I didn't like very much. I liked the songs, but the production was very sterile.

So ever since then I just decided that I want to make strange records in my bedroom, and make records that are idiosyncratic and hopefully atmospheric and emotional. I don't want to make records that necessarily fit a market niche, because I think it's hard enough to try and make great art; to give yourself that goal, that intention of trying to make something beautiful and wonderful, that in itself is hard enough, but when you start trying to accommodate or second-guess the tastes of people you've never met in the Midwest, or radio programmers in the South or whatever, it just confuses things too much.

It's foolhardy to assume that you can predict what an audience is going to want, anyway.

A lot of people are good at second-guessing an audience.

But it's such a huge diversion from what you can do, want to do, should do.

Ideally, a musician's job is making something beautiful that they love, and hopefully in the process create something other people might love as well. But it has to be a sort of simple, direct process. When Janis Joplin was recording "Me and Bobby McGee," I'm assuming it was a song that she loved, and that her friends loved. I'm guessing that she wasn't thinking to herself, Oh, perhaps there are radio programmers 3,000 miles away who will respond to this...

The moment you start thinking like that, it goes badly wrong. At least for me, it goes badly wrong. When other musicians and producers do that, they do it very well. But accommodating a commercial marketplace is not my strong suit. I've tried, and when I try, I fail.

There are people who can do good work in the commercial sphere. They just have a knack for it.

Go back to, let's say, 1972, or the late '60s. The marketplace was a lot more accommodating for idiosyncratic artists then, and when you had the ascendance of FM radio, where they're playing weird album tracks, artists were rewarded for being creative. That's how Led Zeppelin could put out records without their name or their picture on the cover.

That was a pretty remarkable climate; with all these radio stations and all these journalists playing music and reporting on musicians, it was like, the stranger the better. Frank Zappa would put out a Mothers of Invention record that was borderline unlistenable and it would still get played on the radio, and the press would still review it.

Cut to today, and there's so much music of every kind being made, and it's even more difficult to predict what's going to be commercially viable. Did you have something like that in mind when you did this new album?

The only time I ever found myself making some sort of effort to accommodate the marketplace was with that album Hotel. I think I've had a few minor epiphanies, and sometimes epiphanies for me are when I realize things that should be self-evident to everybody else. Sometimes with certain things I'm a little dense, and something will get through that almost everybody else in the world probably realized a long time ago.

So one of my epiphanies was, I was at an MTV awards show five, six years ago, and I'm sitting there between Jessica Simpson and Ludacris, and I was just looking around, and it suddenly dawned on me: I don't like this. This isn't my world. I don't like the records these people make, I don't like their approach to making music, it's not my world. I don't respect this process, I don't respect their goals. I wish everyone well, and I hope that if someone wants to be a pop star and they make radio-friendly music, god bless 'em, I hope they have a good life and do really well. It's not my milieu, it's not my world.

And it felt a little bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; I looked around and I thought, What the hell am I doing here? What am I doing surrounded by these people that the only thing we have in common is that we eat and sleep?

That was a nice epiphany.

Do you remember how you acted on that feeling following that?

I probably went out and got drunk. [Laughs] Sometimes, with realizations and epiphanies, I have the reaction and I sort of file it away to examine over time. I'm just trying to figure out what the fuck the ramifications might be.

I wonder if you felt a bit trapped, or inspired to set about in a different direction.

It took a little while.

You still had your commercial obligations to the corporations.

And a degree of fear. I mean, when I was growing up, I never expected to have a record deal, I never expected to make music that anyone would listen to, and when I found myself putting out records and having people willing to pay attention to them, it confused me, and I was suddenly trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do. Am I supposed to follow in the footsteps of Lou Reed and make Metal Machine Music Part 2? Or try and straddle the fence between things that have integrity and creativity but can also sell and reach a mass market?

It was interesting how your confusion played out in the public eye. The variety of things that you kept coming out with was quite broad.

It does amaze me that I still get to make records. I mean, how I've managed to have a career as a recording artist for this long...I should have been some obscure little footnote in the history of popular music, or maybe I could have had a couple of singles in 1990 and that was it. Maybe someone at Record Collector magazine six months ago should've mentioned one of my singles in a sentence, and that would be the whole story.

So the fact that I still can make records and I can do interviews and I can do these things –– it feels wrong. This is sort of narcissistic, but it feels like a shift in the time-space continuum; the way things should have worked out, I should be teaching community college and making music in my bedroom that no one listens to. That to me feels like the natural order of things.

I've been making records for 20 years, and it still feels weird. I always thought I would be just a fan of other people's music and I would make music on my own that no one would ever pay attention to.

Hearing you talk this way reminds me of conversations I've had with Robert Wyatt. For him it's as if it was all an accident, a mistake. But he has such a fascination with what he does.

Some musicians seem to have this incredible sense of entitlement, and I kind of envy that. I'm guessing, but Led Zeppelin in 1975, when they put out a record, they knew everyone was gonna pay attention. There are those musicians, when they put out a record, they expect attention; they show up for interviews, and they sit back and let the journalist do all the work, and they just assume that the person they're talking to has listened to the record and that it was a privilege for them.

When I talk to journalists and they've listened to the record, I'm flattered. I'm like, wow, thank you for taking 65 minutes out of your life to listen to the record. Because when I play the record, I don't expect anyone to listen to it. And nice, low expectations can be really healthy. Maybe it's a product of emotional issues that I should deal with in therapy, but not expecting anything makes a lot of it a pleasant surprise.

Yesterday I was doing interviews and a couple of journalists said they actually liked this record. And I really felt taken aback.

Have you been in different kinds of situations with writers, where you've been on the defensive?

Certainly I've noticed when the journalist doesn't like the record, and it's a job. And that [laughs] –– for me, it's just awkward, it makes me feel uncomfortable. I also know what it's like to do an interview with a journalist who's just completely disinterested. The best question I've ever received, the journalist asked, "What's the name of your record?" And I just started laughing, and I was like, You're not into this, are you?

The production on this record is intriguing, partly because it's a DIY kind of thing, but also because you seem to have had certain realizations about the particulars of sound in pop music: There's too much high end, there's too much midrange and there's too much emphasis on big pounding rhythm sections, all of which are actually ways of turning away the ear. It's amazing that those technical concerns have not become a more obvious consideration in the production and engineering of music.

Well, a lot of musicians are kind of insecure, and in my case I'm sort of an autodidact, so when I was recording and mixing stuff at home, for the longest time I thought I was doing it wrong. This was in the '80s and '90s. I liked the music I was making, but I assumed that because I didn't know how to work in a studio, and I didn't know how to do it professionally, that I must have been doing it wrong.

    And then I thought, Oh, all these people working in big studios are selling tens of millions of records, they know what they're doing, they're the smart ones, they know how to mix records and record records. And then you realize that they have certain skills that are great, but unfortunately a lot of engineers have this major-label cookie-cutter approach to recording and mixing records, where it doesn't matter if they're making a rap record or a pop record or whatever, it's the same production ethos applied to everything, which is basically: Make every sound as loud as it can be.

And I like loud music, but for example going back to Led Zeppelin, if you listen to "The Immigrant Song," the only reason it sounds so loud is because it has dynamics to it. There's actually subtlety there, and there's nuance, and it's not a terribly loud recording, but it sounds loud because of the contrasts within the song.

Over the last few years I realized my favorite records were recorded in relatively unconventional ways, especially by today's standards. So, making this record, I really, specifically wanted to record it the way records were recorded a long time ago, with a lot of space, a lot of atmosphere –– and not incredibly loud drums, where the kit drum feels like it's a truck falling off of a building, but recording a drum set like it's a musical instrument. And letting everything breathe a little bit.

And it made the whole thing a lot more fun. When you're recording and mixing a record, and you're trying to make something that you want to listen to, as opposed to second-guessing radio, suddenly it's liberating –– you can just have fun, and you can experiment, and you can make atmospheric, open-ended-sounding recordings that would probably sound terrible on pop radio, but that sound wonderful in the living room.

The album hangs together like a book, which owes a lot to the way you've sequenced the songs.

When I make a record that's gonna have 15 songs on it, I'll write 300 songs. It doesn't mean they're good songs [laughs], but I'll be very prolific, write 300 songs, narrow it down to that 25, and live with those 25 and figure out what order they should be in while I'm finishing the songs. And so by the time the record's done I have a rough idea of what the sequence should be.

    The sequencing of an album, the order of the songs, is really important for me for two reasons: one, because I'm part of a dying breed where an album as a cohesive body of work, as an art form, can be quite profound. I like individual songs, but boy, when an album does hold together, it can be remarkable.

And also, because I care about the last songs on the record, if I feel that I've sequenced it well, it increases the likelihood that someone might actually listen to the whole thing. With an awkwardly sequenced record, you decrease the chance that someone will ever listen to it in its entirety.

When you sat down to play and record these songs, I gather that the instruments you chose to do it with were not exactly state of the art –– a deliberate move on your part.

Well, I use Pro Tools, because that enabled me to record at home, and Pro Tools is a very neutral recording medium. It's not like tape –– Pro Tools doesn't really add anything, it doesn't really subtract anything, and it's a great way for me to record, because that way I can just take really lo-fi, strange instruments, record them with a good microphone, with a good pre-amp, and end up with something on Pro Tools that's quite usable.

But it was a fun process, because I wasn't trying to record competently; I wasn't trying to record professionally, I was just trying to make it sound interesting.

You worked with producer Ken Thomas on this project. What'd he bring to it?

What he brought to it was two things: one, he's a very competent engineer, so he was able to take the songs I recorded and make them sound really nice and make them sit together well.

But he's also really open to experimentation, so if we're mixing a song and I say, Well, I listened to a Jefferson Airplane record and the drums are all on the right channel, maybe we should mix the sound with the drums all on the right channel, and just put the reverb in the left channel, many modern engineers wouldn't let me do that. That would fall into their idea of the wrong way to do something. And Ken was open to anything. The more I pushed things in a strange direction, production and mixwise, the more excited he became.

Was it because of his pedigree that you chose him to work with? He's produced a lot of very outside-type artists, relative to the rock music norm.

He didn't really talk about it that much. He started out working in a studio where Pink Floyd and David Bowie were working, so he could've gone on a very conventional, commercial route. But he didn't –– I mean, look at his résumé, almost everything he's produced is strange, from Throbbing Gristle to Sigur Rós to a lot of the early punk rock things –– he produced Boyd Rice! [Laughs]

So when I looked at his résumé, I just thought, This is perfect, there's no one else I could work with. He's just very relaxed, very open-minded, but also able to make things sound as nice as they could. It's one thing to approach things in a sort of freeform, experimental way, but given his experience he was able to make things sound quite pretty in the process.

You had been thinking about your punk roots during the making of this record, citing Black Flag and Joy Division, among others. While Wait for Me doesn't sound much like a punk rock record, the attitude behind the making of the music links it with punk values of yore.

I would hope so. In the early '80s, when I was playing in hardcore punk bands, I used to have a lot of conflict with my fellow punk rock friends, because there is this dichotomy between the form of punk rock and the ethos of punk rock. And to me, the ethos was much more important than the form. The form –– loud music played by white guys in leather jackets –– that's interesting and it's fun, but there never seemed to be any slavish devotion to that. The devotion is to the idea of experimentation, open-mindedness, creativity, and not too much concern for the marketplace.

The form of punk rock was exciting and fun, but I was much more seduced by the ideas behind it. And as much as I love the straightforward punk rock bands, it's the people who –– when John Lydon made Public Image, the second album especially was so strange and so experimental, that was what really resonated with me, that idea that you could as a musician as part of your job description do whatever you wanted. And in the process, if you alienated people, that was just fine.

Wire is the perfect example of that split between form and ethos in punk rock.

Wire should be incredibly wealthy, just from suing all the people who've ripped them off. All those Britpop records were just direct lifts from Wire.

Wait for Me's last track is called "Isolate," which sums up the tone of the album. So, how were you feeling when you did this record? Or is that not relevant?

It's relevant, but it's –– I mean, there've been times in my life when I've been depressed and working on happy music, and incredibly happy and working on depressing music. So there isn't a specific correlation between my mental state and the nature of a song.

Generally, I like sad music. I like mournful music, I like personal music, and emotional music. So clearly, this record is not the product of a happy-go-lucky person who lives on the beach. [Laughs] I mean, emotionally I think I'm a normal person, I have good days, bad days, good moments, bad moments... So yeah, it wasn't coming from a place of extreme despondence. It was just coming from where I am, hopefully a normal emotional person.

The last record I made was called Last Night, and it was more of a fun dance record, and that was a real easy record to talk about. And this one, to talk about it, I find myself running the risk of sounding just a little too earnest. But one of the only things that's important to me in the whole process of being a musician is the sort of humble and profound relationship between the musician and someone willing to listen to the music. Everything else is window dressing.

And I also don't like the idea of any aspect of a hierarchy within my world, my personal world, my professional world, that idea that somehow the musician is above the people at the record company –– I just don't see any evidence for that in my life. It's sort of a division of labor, but it's very separate but equal. And if I start thinking differently, I get very unhealthy.

Some musicians are great at being arrogant, but it's not my strength and I don't think any good comes from it. Self-importance or arrogance,  these are concrete things that I try to work against, because they don't improve the quality of my life at all. And they certainly can inhibit my ability to make the music that I really want to make.