How does it feel going back to the material on Exile for the rerelease?
Listen to what’s on my car radio right now [turns up “Dance of the Seven Veils”]. I need to relearn all this stuff. I don’t know that it’s ever going to come out of me the same way, but when I listen to the record, I can feel that vibe coming over me — I can feel where I was at. Back then my life was so simple. I just lived in this state … it wasn’t a particularly happy state, it was a kind of pissed-off, fuck-the-world, separate-from-the-world state. I didn’t engage in the world. I could barely make it to the grocery store. So that’s a challenge for me — getting back into that singular point of view. In the documentary, John Cusack says he saw you as “the wrath of the repressed.” Did you feel like that when you were making the record, and do you still? I did, and I still do occasionally, though it’s much different now. At the time, I was seething at the surface. I was a boiling hot tub of oil ready to scald if I could, ’cause I pretty much spent my youth trying to be perfect for every
