The family that raised me are awesome people and they are my mother and my father and my brother and my sister. I've never viewed them as these "strangers" that took over. It's never been this crazy, dramatic, Lifetime-movie situation. It's been chill.

I wasn't an only child, but I was the youngest, and no one else in my family played music.

I was adopted legally around age three, but it's not like this thing I think about when I wake up every day. I was adopted by my foster parents, so I was comfortable with them. I wasn't in this alien place.

In high school I was in a band called Goodfight, but it was more me running around on stage. It was very punk inspired. Then I started to get into indie-rock and older music and decided I wanted to write my own stuff. I quit the band. Around 16 or 17, I started recording myself at home on keyboard and piano.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

You want to create things as purely as possible without allowing the universe to interfere so much that it's manipulating it and making things unreal to you.

You get to a certain age and it really occurs to you: "My mother and my father will not always be here. My spouse or my girlfriend or boyfriend are here right now, but someday they won't be." You realize that you need to like yourself.