I didn't really know why I wanted to go to college. I didn't really have a reason to go there other than the fact that everybody else was doing it.

We're all living in different states and we all have different systems within those states. Even on the most basic personal level, it affects me.

There's something scary about the unknown. And maybe the scariest movies couldn't ever be made because they are too deep in somebody's head, too unknown to get out.

The melody and the structure of a song always comes first for me, so the emotions behind it can sometimes be a challenge: What am I feeling about this song? Where did the melody come from? I want it to be heartfelt.

It's not so much a philosophy as much as it is a pace. We need to be personally involved with every aspect of the records including the artwork, we want everything to have a similar aesthetic.

An important meeting point for me was realizing the similarity between a DJ set and a Grateful Dead set: I grew up listening to how the Dead would take a song and just jam on it, and then transition into another song.

It's weird, in New York, it's like the big theme of everything is folk music and interacting with people. Maryland is where the landscape of our music comes from, it was more like, let's walk around. People are saying that we are part of some sort of folk scene. We don't feel connected with it. We do live in the city, and communicate with people. It's all folk music.