I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.
God, our world is so complicated.
Sometimes I make stuff, and even I don't like it. There's something about it that I don't really like, or annoys me. For whatever reason it needs to come out.
I saw certain things that I think maybe other kids are protected from. Like, I saw my parents struggling. I knew that we were cutting out coupons and buying dented cans because they were cheaper. And all our furniture was from the garbage. It was just - and to me because I was a kid, all that stuff was really exciting.
We don't have a lot of power in the world, right? We can only control so many things. It allows you to curate your own emotional and artistic intake of life.
I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.
I think to me, all songs are stories.
You are always growing, so maybe the way that you bring the songs forward and translate them is more mature.
You decide if you're ready for something. It can come in the guise of, "Oh, I don't think I like this."
Most of the time I don't even talk about any direct lineage of songs, because I feel like it just chains them down into my own consciousness, and the whole fun of them is being able to live in others' consciousness.
I started to write before I went to SUNY Purchase music conservatory. As an audition I submitted what I now think are really awful songs, but I guess they saw something in them.
I think that you have to let yourself be agitated and annoyed and not be fully comfortable.
I always have kind of a few books going at the same time.
There's an artist that I listened to for the first time, and I really didn't like them. I had some kind of adverse reaction, and later, it became my favorite thing.
Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.
You are my sweetest downfall.
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.
When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.
I don't really make records chronologically.
I'm both kinds of a person; I have a side of me that's very light and very optimistic and finds everything surreal and hilarious, and then I have a side of me that's - I don't know what the right word is - tormented or just feels very overwhelmed.
It's painful to watch your parents not be in control of things.
I think that I'm always going to think that it's silly to value certain things that no matter how many people find it really valuable, it's always just going to seem a little silly to me.
I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.
I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.
