I just had a really crappy time in school and I spent a lot of time writing songs and not doing work. I started talking to Noah - Panda Bear - about recording a really solid album, spending a lot of time on it to get it to sound exactly the way we wanted it to.

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.

I definitely didn't have a lot of money. I had been fired from a record store. I was just trying to get by. I was on unemployment. I didn't have anything going full-time.

Sometimes I have the idea right away, like, "Oh, this is what this song's about. This is how I'm feeling."

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.

I think it's cool to give people encouragement.

I just had a really crappy time in school and I spent a lot of time writing songs and not doing work. I started talking to Noah - Panda Bear - about recording a really solid album, spending a lot of time on it to get it to sound exactly the way we wanted it to.