Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down.

I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams and I work in a way that has more control.

You only get one album. You only get one single. You get one shot in music. But I have a million different dreams. Why can't I go out and try to achieve them all? Who are you to say I can't?

'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.

I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same Infact we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

One day when I was like 9 I heard the Beatles on the radio and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school.

I did Albert Hall I got to play the Hall of Fame with Prince. So I've done that kind of stuff for ages. It wasn't until after we finished working on Brainwash my dad's album after he died then it was like 'That phase is over in my life now now we can get on with our music with our band.'

I listened to the radio so I was influenced by everyone from Michael Jackson to Milli Vanilli. But thankfully my dad had a collection of Cat Stevens albums while my mom was listening to jazz.

We had a huge audience we sold truckloads of albums. If we do something that's cool people will listen to it. If we don't we would be selling people short.

It's pretty cool that people will pay for something even though they don't have to. It's totally different now to back in the day. Now you're paying for a record because you believe in the band. In the future that will be the only time people will pay for albums because there's some kind of connection.

If your album sells that's cool more people find out about you more people get turned on to what we're really about-which is a live rock and roll band.

You make your first album you make some money and you feel like you still have to show face like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?

I got a chance to have my dream come true and I wanted to make sure I made the decision as to when I dropped my last album. If I don't feel like this album is an incredible piece of work then I'm cool with the albums I've done. I don't have to put out another album.

But my main thing that I would love to see as a fan of 'Glee ' like I said is to really get into the character and who they are and what they do outside of school. I think that that's interesting. And then of course the themed stuff and the album episodes are all really cool too.

Every night I fell asleep to a different Beatles album. So I'm very familiar with the Beatles Ringo was my favorite Beatle until I grew up and then changed. I made the switch over to George Harrison just in time to regain my cool.

Well we didn't have our original drummer on our last record. And most of that album was not played as a band in the studio. It was mostly the world of computers and overdubs. There was very few things played live or worked out as a band.

It's been really fun to see with each album when I change to see the fans of the show emulate my style and with the first record a lot of the kids in the crowd were wearing neck ties like I was and now you'll see a lot of girls with pink hair. It's cool it's actually really neat.

Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50 000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations.

When I finish an album and I find myself listening to it in the car because it makes me feel a certain way that's the time to try to let other people know about it.

For my birthday this year my girlfriends - who knew I'd just inherited my dad's turntable - gave me a carton of albums like 'Blue Kentucky Girl ' by Emmylou Harris and 'Off the Wall ' by Michael Jackson. It's all stuff we grew up with. I mean you can't have a music collection without Prince's 'Purple Rain' - it just can't be done!

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs my attitude my creativity and colored them in a way that is unique.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

I use the music to vent and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety stress and depression so that's how the album came out so dark.