People say 'I don't want to die alone!' But you know what, honestly? I don't want to die with a bunch of people looking at me.

A song like "Walkabout", it's totally imitative. The goal of that song was to make people happy, and I've never really made a song to make people happy before. I really genuinely wanted people to listen to that song and have their spirits lifted.

I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time.

I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.

Everything I do is 100% automation, which means I'm just doing it live.

I always write the first and last song of an album first, and then the middle just kind of happens.