I think it's cool to give people encouragement.
Hell is a swamp, to me - not as something fiery, but as something dank, moist, and wet.
There's something scary about the unknown. And maybe the scariest movies couldn't ever be made because they are too deep in somebody's head, too unknown to get out.
I didn't really know why I wanted to go to college. I didn't really have a reason to go there other than the fact that everybody else was doing it.
I'm not against being proud of where you come from but I feel like sometimes the divisions are a little too bold and it hurts us more than it helps us.
I think we stumbled onto our own sort of lore back in high school. We weren't with the drinkers, we were more the psychedelic warriors. We sat around watching horror films.
Things have changed. The suburbs are developed, but other parts, like where we recorded Spirit and Danse Manatee are still woodland and farmland.
People seem to think that folk music is people with acoustic guitars. Or punk music is people with mohawks, leather jackets.
The melody and the structure of a song always comes first for me, so the emotions behind it can sometimes be a challenge: What am I feeling about this song? Where did the melody come from? I want it to be heartfelt.
I love electronic music as much as I love something that sounds like 'Pullhair Rubeye,' or something a little bit more organic than that.
An important meeting point for me was realizing the similarity between a DJ set and a Grateful Dead set: I grew up listening to how the Dead would take a song and just jam on it, and then transition into another song.
I definitely don't want to play by myself. I don't relate to playing music that way. I like interacting with people.
Music can be so manipulating - especially in terms of horror. It's such an important part of building the tension.
It's not so much a philosophy as much as it is a pace. We need to be personally involved with every aspect of the records including the artwork, we want everything to have a similar aesthetic.
It's weird, in New York, it's like the big theme of everything is folk music and interacting with people. Maryland is where the landscape of our music comes from, it was more like, let's walk around. People are saying that we are part of some sort of folk scene. We don't feel connected with it. We do live in the city, and communicate with people. It's all folk music.
In a lot of African music, the singers are just singing whatever they feel at the time - because the instrumentation is repetitive, they can come and go as they please. That's how we approach it. Not verse-chorus-verse.
I just had a really crappy time in school and I spent a lot of time writing songs and not doing work. I started talking to Noah - Panda Bear - about recording a really solid album, spending a lot of time on it to get it to sound exactly the way we wanted it to.
I definitely didn't have a lot of money. I had been fired from a record store. I was just trying to get by. I was on unemployment. I didn't have anything going full-time.
I always thought it was important for my lyrics to come from a really honest place.
Sometimes I have the idea right away, like, "Oh, this is what this song's about. This is how I'm feeling."
Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.
We're all living in different states and we all have different systems within those states. Even on the most basic personal level, it affects me.
It's too bad music can't be like movies. For me, playing music and listening to music and creating music is very environmental. It creates a certain environment; it sets a specific mood.
