Rest of the day could include all kinds of music making but rarely goes without Earl Grey. Deerhoof is my main musical thing. I play drums, I write songs, I record, I mix, I play everyone’s else’s instruments just to be a pest but then they do the same thing. In our band no one is in charge and nothing ever feels finished. Several months of any given year where normal people are having months, we just X them out because we’re living in an alternation between a rented minivan and a stage. I sit shotgun and so govern the navigation. We always seem to arrive at rush hour. I make friends with venue staff in order to assure that the lights are the right color in that one song. As much as we love and trust our sound engineer who is our fifth Beatle, at the beginning of any tour I spend much of soundcheck out front tweaking tones while Ed John or Satomi get their chance to play the drums. It is one of rock music’s great mysteries and frustrations that everyone loves to play the drums, but few want to listen to them. I take a post-show shift at the merch table and try not to drip upon the customers.

I answer the emails to the webpage, I tweet to the Twitter account. We’re always in the middle of planning one-off shows and recording projects. Deerhoof is hands-on with anyone we work with. I’m the liaison to the record labels, the publicist, and our US booking agent. Sometimes this is a matter of answering questions, but just as often I’m coming to them with stuff like “I don’t like the way Spotify works for artists, can we take all our music down from there?” or “The way music journalists describe Deerhoof is so utterly inaccurate!” and then having a drawn-out discussion.

I feel a little sorry for younger bands that get too successful too quickly and get assigned all manner of managers to take care of most of this stuff. They are told to “leave it to the experts.” I’d feel robbed, not just of the money being diverted to middlemen, but of the experience of learning how things work and taking responsibility for one’s own art and image.

Outside of Deerhoof I’m a small-time DIY producer, recording or mixing or mastering records for people. I play in other groups regularly and irregularly. Live improv concerts are always a good test of nerve. I write notated music. Past few years, I’ve been working a lot with a European chamber group called s t a r g a z e, writing pieces, writing arrangements of other people’s music, rewriting my writing when some member of the group can’t make it to the gig because classical musicians are the busiest people I know.

How do manage your time to make room for each of these commitments whilst keeping yourself financially independent and living a relatively balanced life?

So much of a musician’s life depends on inspiration so time management always seems tricky somehow. When you don’t have any ideas you can very easily do nothing. When the lightbulbs are going off you suddenly want to do everything at once. Irregular sleep scheduling has often provided excellent results.