It does suggest a lot of possibilities, though. Are there other things you’ve been itching to do?
No, not really. I wanna keep making music, but I wanna make it a different way, I want to be more active myself. I’m going to be 47 in October, and I’m getting too old to be a gang leader. It’s kind of silly and immature at this point. It makes more sense to do this under my own name. It’s more real. You can become an aging rocker if you’re yourself, not in a band. There’s integrity there and a sense of maturity. I’d like to write a bit. I’ve always tampered with the notion of writing a book. I just did a book of poetry. I’d like to do collages. The other thing about breaking up Guided By Voices is that it’s good to bring closure to something. You can look at it, evaluate it, and you can say five years down the line, “Oh, that was good” or “Oh, that was silly.” As long as it’s a work in progress, it’s difficult to do that. I want to step back and look at Guided By Voices and see what it was. And go on from there.

Right now I’m into working with Todd Tobias because we have a great sense of what each other wants. Todd’s a quiet guy, but a genius guy, brilliant. I have a full band with one guy; on this record, I sang and played guitar, and he did everything else. You can call it laziness, I guess. [Laughs] I don’t have to be in the business of rehearsing or delegating, we just go in the studio and bang it out. What I wanna do is get back to where it’s in house, there’s a certain mystique about it, you don’t see me as much anymore. By doing that, it’s more appealing that way, and it’s how it was with Guided By Voices in the early days. You know, we were somewhat more mysterious then, people didn’t know [if it was] a band or how old we were, who’s in the band and who’s not, what we will do when we play live. Especially the way we recorded, we were really experimental in the early days. Over the years, with a certain amount of visibility, it becomes less appealing. As a listener and as a fan, I can say that the longer somebody sticks around, the less I dig it.

Led Zeppelin, in terms of packaging and the way the band was presented to the public, was shrouded in mystery and they capitalized on that mystique over the years. At the time they were the most written-off band in rock, but in the rearview mirror, they’re a lot more legendary now than they were.
Well, yeah, you have to end it in order for people to be able to do that. When it’s ongoing, people are always going to say, “Oh, here comes another Led Zeppelin album.” But if it’s over, 10 years down the road, you can take a look at it and say it’s historically important or has a place in rock. Unless I break up the band or end it, it can’t happen. I’d like to hear, 10 years down the road, what people have to say about it. Because for the last 10 years we’ve been in the public eye, people have largely dug what we attempted to do, the heart of it: We didn’t try to sell ourselves, we didn’t promote it or try to make it, but we did in spite of ourselves. I’d like to hear what people think about it later. Was it important or was it just silly? Maybe we shouldn’t have come out of the basement, you know? [Laughs]

Oh, I don’t think so. It’s interesting in listening to the new album, there’s sort of a tour going on. “Girls Of Wild Strawberries” and “Window Of My World” are among the best things you’ve written. How much of this album is new, and how much is a skimming of material you hadn’t used previously?
Oh, they’re all new songs. I discovered all these old cassettes ... for whatever reason, the songs appeal to me now but didn’t when I had written them. They’re nostalgic to me and sound better now. Some of the things that weren’t good enough for me then are for whatever reason good enough for me now. What I do when I write is I’ll brainstorm and write a lot of songs and then edit very quickly; I’ll just go through things and say “these are the 15 I want to use, the rest, I’ll just forget about.” So it’s nice to have this box to go back and refer to. I’ll write more new songs, too, but it’s just a new stage and facet of what I do, to find these old things. That’s actually how I put together Bee Thousand: At that time, I was in a slump in terms of writing. So I said I’ll go back through… I call them my “Brain Files.” I’ll see if there’s anything redeemable going all the way back to when I was a kid, so I went back in my mind and wrote down and recorded all these little pieces I thought were good. I’d take a part of one song and add it to part of another: “Tractor Rape Chain” was like three different songs, basically. So I put a lot of songs together that way, and that’s what I did on the new record. Some people worry about writer’s block; I never worry about that, I know things are going to come eventually. Even if I go into something of a slump, I can just go to the suitcase and find some stuff.

I’ll throw out some ideas in terms of how time might tell if GBV was actually worth doing. One thing that stands out for me above all else: a snippet can be a song. You elevated the art of the idea into something of a finished product no matter how it’s recorded or how “finished” it sounds.
It can be a finished idea, yeah. Another thing we added was that we didn’t care about mistakes or the sound of it; the important thing was to get down as many ideas as we could and go on to the next thing, you know? The fact that a 25-second song is a song and not just a throwaway. Our first record was actually Forever Since Breakfast, and we went to this big studio in Kentucky and recorded and it just sounded so lame, so sterile, it wasn’t how I imagined our music was supposed to sound at all. So the next record, Devil Between My Toes, I vowed, “I’m just going to put whatever version or tape of my favorite songs we’ve done—in the studio, live, in the basement, wherever—it’s just going to be a compilation of my favorite songs, the best-sounding songs.” And that became the aesthetic, which later in the ‘90s—with Sebadoh, the Grifters, Pavement, the Palace Brothers—became a movement. And we were even heralded for doing it first, they called us “the grandfathers of lo-fi” and that sort of shit. And we didn’t understand because we just didn’t have any money, which is why we were recording on a four track. But we became part of this movement and it was probably the last thing that could be done with rock that was interesting. I was talking to (bassist Chris) Slusarenko last night, telling him that someone needs to do a big piece on that movement, with all the album covers and everything.

Sure, MAGNET could do that—it’s right up our alley, one of our “movement” stories: more of a guiding principle than a byproduct.
Well, it was real! People were after real sounds, recording something other than grunge. It was different than what was going on at the time. People were saying, “Well, I’m not going to go into a studio, I’m going to do it on our own. It’ll sound like it’s right here in the room.” And that was refreshing, I think.

People always talk about grunge like it was the anti-metal, but really, the thing commercially that was happening when you guys first set forth was hair metal. You can’t get much more diametrically opposed to hair metal than Guided By Voices. That’s probably why it struck a chord.
Lo-fi was punk. More punk than punk, actually. Instead of thumbing our nose at society, what we did was to go against what was supposed to be done. You’re supposed to go into a studio and make your stuff sound good. It was confusing to me at the time—punk was recorded well, whereas lo-fi was this thrashy sound. Whatever you wanted to throw onto a record, you could.

It’s the logical successor to punk. It went back to getting at the heart of an idea or emotion, rather than merely conveying the style of it.
That was the thing about recording live to a four track in the basement; your ideas come out spontaneously, as quickly as possible, immediately. It’s the closest it can be to the original conception you had in your brain. I got sick of going into a studio, practicing, banging it out, and then it didn’t sound right. But like any movement, it had to end. Eventually all the bands ended up going to studios anyway, everything people had learned on their own, they had to go and see if they could reproduce that in a studio setting. It’s difficult to do. Some of the things we did in the studio weren’t all that successful, some were. Now, in the studio with Todd, we can make it sound immediate and fresh, not over-rehearsed and sterile. But in order to do that, you have to be with someone you trust. I was able to do with Toby (Sprout), because I’d known him for years. I was able to do it with my brother Jim and Mitch (Mitchell) because we were together for years. But, “Let’s get together with this guy from Stereolab or the guy from Velvet Revolver.” I can’t do that kind of thing. If you send me the music, I can make up stuff over the top. I guess I’m still kind of shy, and some of the people who’ve been struck by Guided By Voices over the years and wanted to work with me for some reason, I just don’t know if I can do that. I’m intimidated by that. I was intimidated by Ric Ocasek. He’s a hell of a great guy, and I enjoyed the experience of working with him, but it’s hard for me to give him any input on what I wanted: “Well, you’re Ric, you’re the man, you know what I want, obviously.” [Laughs]

In your view, is there anything left on the table with GBV, or did you rid your system completely of what you wanted to do?
No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty happy, we’ve done everything I wanted to do. One time when I got really egotistical—when we got signed by a major and started recording in big studios—I wanted to play on the main stage of these big festivals. It’s silly in retrospect. I’d be at some festival in Philadelphia wondering, “Why are we playing the second stage and Jack Black is playing second to headline on the main stage? It’s bullshit!” But now I’m like, “Who cares?” [Laughs] We never got to be the main stage headliners.

Maybe that’s what people will say in 10 years: “Why weren’t they headliners at Lollapalooza?” There will be indignation and outrage.
Yeah, and then we’ll have to come back and do the whole Pixies-style reunion.