My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.
That’s why I make music. When I listen to my favorite music made by other people, that’s what it does to me. So as a musician, I’m just trying to do the same thing with music I make. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when someone comes to me and says the music I’ve made has affected them emotionally, that’s the most gratifying part of my job.
When I can really open myself up to someone and show someone who I really am, it's amazing when it happens.
When I listen to gospel singers pouring their heart out to God, it's the act of pouring their hearts out that interests me.
I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.
I'm a weird, bald musician who makes records in his bedroom and lives in the Lower East Side.
I’ve been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.
What makes me feel old is having no hair on the top of my head.
The young have to kill the old. The young, if they want to achieve their own platform, have to diminish the reputations of the ones that have gone before. That's how life works.
All I want to do with my life is try and make music that I really love, and so every day I try and work on music.
There are certain songs that if people come up to me and tell me how much that song meant to them, I think, You should have better taste, then, because I don't really like that song.
To me, one of the easiest ways of addressing climate change and potentially remedying climate change is to stop subsidizing animal agriculture.
As time passes and the more advanced science becomes, the more interesting it becomes.
For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist.
The world is experiencing great change, but you've got loads of people terrified of this change and the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons making utterly simplistic, reductionist policy proposals that are unrealistic but then people buy it up.
Honestly, the most vulnerable part of my life is probably just honest expression, as cliché as that might sound.
I remind myself that the universe is 15 billion years old, and I'm only 46 years old, so my perspective is sort of limited and fear-based and skewed. So I sort of turn things over to whatever you want to call it - whether it's God, or the universe or the spirit of the universe - and I just sort of turn things over to God and hope that this spirit that has been around for 15 billion years will have a better understanding of how things should be than I do.
I think that, for a lot of us, the closer we get to showing people who we really are, that's where we feel the most uncomfortable, the most vulnerable. But it's also where the healthiest growth comes from. Like when I can really open myself up to someone and show someone who I really am, it's amazing when it happens.
I don't think too much about how it might exist in the world in a commercial sense - I more just try and focus on making music that I love and trying to put it out into the world.
I was raised with this idea that we're supposed to be tolerant of other people's opinions, but then what happens if other people's opinions are racist and hateful and wrong?
I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.
You could almost say that throughout human history there are people who can either foresee consequences or who are capable of looking for information and predicting the consequences will happen, but the vast majority of people won't respond to climate change until their city is underwater, food supply is disrupted or everyone around them is dying of zoonotic disease. It's almost like someone dealing with an addiction, like you hope that the person can overcome the addiction before the addiction kills them.
We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.
I'm gonna have to start walking down the street and start hitting people in the head!
When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was fit in, but if you're perpetually an outsider, it gives you a perspective that might have a little more objectivity than people who really feel connected to their social environment in which they grow up.
