There was a place in my town called CD Concept and I would call them and reserve a CD I wanted, like Incesticide. But it had a parental advisory on it, so I called them, like, "Can I buy this album even though it has a parental advisory sticker?" The guy said, "Sure." I was eight.

I started listening to Nirvana in 1994, right after Kurt Cobain died. Nirvana was the end point-- everything that followed in their footsteps was automatically a bastardization of what they were supposed to be. But, at the time, I'm sure Pixies fans were like, "Nirvana is just a pop version of the Pixies." So I listened to Nirvana for a long time and then, for some reason, I just totally stopped one day and I haven't listened to them since.

At 11, I started playing guitar in a band with two other friends. We practiced and recorded in my friend's barn. I recently put on one of the tapes we made back then, and it's sloppy but very technically proficient-- there are some crazy drum parts and guitar lines. We started as a pop-punk band and then we did an acoustic thing, which was horrible. We would just trade acoustic guitar solos on every song; that record is going to get out there someday, and we're going to be mortified.

The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin

This was in the days of Audiogalaxy, so I was just downloading a ton of Flaming Lips stuff. The Soft Bulletin just sounded so different from anything I'd heard. It was weird, but I could still understand it. I still listen to it really often. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is my favorite song of all time-- I'll play it at my funeral. A couple of my friends and I actually got four stereos and listened to the Lips' Zaireeka-- we ate some pot brownies and lost our minds. At the end of it, there are dogs barking all around you at maximum volume. It's terrifying.

The high school band that I played guitar for fell apart and I ended up singing in a rival screamo-funk band. I didn't really want to sing, it just ended up that way. I was just screaming, basically. There's definitely still times where I'm just like, "Man, I wish I was just the guitar player." I remember that band opened for My Chemical Romance once in this really tiny place in Connecticut. It was a really weird bill.