I think we stumbled onto our own sort of lore back in high school. We weren't with the drinkers, we were more the psychedelic warriors. We sat around watching horror films.

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.

I always thought it was important for my lyrics to come from a really honest place.

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.

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.

Around the time I dropped out of college, I decided to start taking what I liked about short stories and apply it to writing songs - to make these things that would change and keep going.