More times than not, it's a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.

If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it's that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records, I don't hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal. I'd like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack. I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn't get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don't even want.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.