A record is worth 10,000 live shows.
I feel like every great record is like a world in itself.
One of the 12 steps is to admit that you're powerless, but I think that's bullshit. I think it's important to empower yourself by facing the stuff that triggers you.
There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art.
I've already had a hard time dealing with some of the trappings of success and turned to some pretty stereotypical escape routes - ways of escaping my own reality and falling into some pretty clichéd situations.
Nobody really wanted to do that one European tour. For one, it was budgeted to lose money. They would've made something, but I would've lost a lot of money.
I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.
To be told that you're the voice of your generation is such an incredible amount of pressure, and I haven't faced that. Maybe by the time our third record rolls around, I will. My goals are to be a band like that in five years. At the moment, though, I can't really relate in any sense to the scale that Kurt Cobain fame has reached.
There are just some things that you can't deny.
In terms of being a kind of popular artist figure and knowing how isolating that is, and knowing what it feels like to be skeptical of people, and to be taken advantage of, especially by your friends. That's a hard to pill to swallow, and we've been through that together, or watched each other go through it. It helps to have somebody that close to you who can relate. I can say with some confidence that I feel like Sky saved my life.
All I'm trying to do is make music that people like and that makes people happy.
It's not like I had a breakdown, though it kind of felt like it at the time. I agreed to everything that happened. You can't really be at work and be like, "That's it. I've had too much. I'm going home."
I am super-interested in fashion. I love being a person whose clothes get discussed. That makes it more interesting for me.
There's positive attention and there's negative attention - negative attention is easy, positive attention requires actual hard work.
I went with Beach Fossils and we played 40 shows because we wanted people to see us.
We were a commodity used by corporations to make their brand look fashionable, but then they used us to keep kids out of venues.
I was raised by all women. I had no men in my life; it was my mom, my sister, and my grandmother. I've never identified as a man. I've always either felt like a boy or something else. I feel really uncomfortable thinking that, technically, I'm supposed to be a man, because I don't feel like one.
I guess I do feel the need to repent. I do feel like I owe the world a great album. I don't know why I feel that way. I just do.
When I read about myself and how writers have focused on negative stuff, it hurts my feelings.
The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written.
Recovery culture teaches you that you have to repent. I don't think that's necessary.
Drugs are fine for you alone at home, but when it comes to being a family, which a band is, it just messes everything up.
I spent my life working before I started band. I worked construction, landscaping. I worked in kitchens, cleaned dishes. I worked demolition.
Some kid can say, "Hey, I really want you to play my town in Switzerland, or Sweden, or Latvia," and they could have a fun night at the show. On the other hand, all those kids could have a record that means something to them in a more personal way a couple months down the road. The live band is a really important thing for us, but my focus is on the album now.
There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.
