The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.

Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.

I grew up outside of Seattle, and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning, and guilt. Almost an "anti-ambition." Like, an awareness, and then a subsequent guilt. But sometimes that progressive, liberal guilt is really obnoxious, too - in some ways, I think it's better to just own it. It's weird, that actually, the acknowledgement of privilege or the enactment of guilt can be as obnoxious as anything else. It's a never-ending rabbit hole. We're really in a rabbit hole right now, with this conversation. We're just spiraling down into the void.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity.

Florida is such an unlikely place for a band, unless you're an emo or hardcore band. In terms of the touring route, or even the way the geography works in terms of bands and communities, Florida's always been this appendage that you either cut it off and dismiss it, or you somehow include it in your scope.

What I value most in new music today is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.