When I was 10, I would hear songs like "I Love You Always Forever" by Donna Lewis on the radio, and I want to make stuff that a 10 year old might hear coming out of the radio and think, "Yeah! I love this!"

You know how some trees have those ear mushrooms that just grow off, and you could live on one of those mushrooms and not realize that there was stacks and stacks of others? That's how I describe music scenes in New York. That's one of the trippiest things about living here - just how many parallel universes there are that you can be completely unaware of.

I was really inspired by this feeling of mania, a caricature of myself that I look down upon and see negatively.

Success will come. Or it won't. But I think you can only make a go at it in a big way by fully being yourself and taking risks. People can feel risks.

No one goes to BrooklynVegan to read about content, they just go for drama. It's a tabloid, the scum of indie.

I saw this wide-eyed girl with big ears and a pink nose who's too excited. I wanted that part of myself to sing lead.

The music industry has completely restructured itself in the last couple of years because it hasn't been making money. Labels are signing bands they trust as artistic entities, instead of cash cows. They're signing bands because they believe that the bands have tastes beyond anything they could concoct themselves.