Music as a social conduit has always been important to me.

Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research.

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

I'm not a home-studio guy. I spend a lot of time working by myself developing songs, but I really need some other counterpart to help me pull it all together, because you go nuts working if I had to finish an entire project all within my own head.

The instrumental record is a bit subtler. It's the kind of stuff on sound check, when I first pick up my violin and start to play, the kind of melodies that just pour out of me. Some of them sound very classical. Some of them sound experimental, polyrhythmic loops that I make.

I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.