I mean the reason that I started writing close to home, "Santa Fe," et cetera, was a kind of looking back on past events. I don't know, it's just some of the dark spaces I've been. And it feels like with a music career and whatnot, I've been able to crawl out of those places. So it's interesting to look back on them and try to hold on to the feeling of what you went through.
I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.
I didn't realize how different our band's senses of melody actually were. I would write a part that just made perfect sense to me, but for them, it was mind-boggling. Likewise, they could play stuff with relative ease that I never could have. If there was something lost in translation melodically, it wouldn't work at all - we'd just be 17 people in a giant room staring awkwardly at each other. When that happened, I'd go home, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then return to smooth sailing.
