I hope people hear my songs and realize that writing music is kind of easy, or that taking your sadness and turning it into a beautiful song is worthwhile.
I played piano for a lot of my childhood and stupidly quit. I wish I hadn't - I could have been a great classical pianist!
I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.
I was thinking about New York and realized how much I hate walking around in the winter and how much I dread getting on the train.
I feel like the cosmos implies mystery, or infinite secrets.
I feel like I can be infinitely inspired because New York is huge. There's always a new street I can go to, or a billion new people who I haven't met that I could write about. New York is very humbling.
Everyone on the Internet is sad. Why else would they be on the Internet?
You meet a lot of people in New York who are different than you, and have different stories, so I see everyone as super individual.
I started going to rock shows at a really young age, and seeing other young people make music definitely influenced me.
My music doesn't sound punk, but I see it as a punk action.
Writing songs about it is a really useful way for me to love New York more, and stay observing it, and not just zone it out.
My relationship to New York has changed a lot. I feel lucky to live here. A lot of times you walk through the city and don't notice that you're in a really beautiful neighborhood, or that you're passing a beautiful building. It's nice, as an exercise, to keep aware that you're in a really lucky place.
When I was younger, my view of New York was really wide-eyed and excited. I've lived here all my life.
The first song I wrote, in fifth grade, was totally ripped from Jeffrey Lewis. My aunt's boyfriend gave me bass lessons, and I played drums for a year in sixth grade. Around seventh grade, I got a guitar and forgot everything else.
There are some people I've met and it's stressful just speaking to them, because they're really pretentious and I don't know how to talk to them without being pretentious back.
