As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

I've always been interested in queerness and underground and fringe and periphery, and who and what flourishes in those spaces. Those spaces that are darker and dingier and more dangerous, more lonely. What comes out of there, to me, is the life force. I'm excited when the center reaches over to those places and pulls inspiration from them, and translates it for a lot of people.

People give the words life through their own adoration or relationship to the work, and that's true of everything. You can't divorce critical or fan reaction. Once it exists, you forget that the words are arbitrary, or you start to remove value.

I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from.

It wasn't just like, "I want to make a record that sounds like classic rock" at all. It was more like, "I want to make a record that is a little more unsettling and maybe isn't as easily understood now." That just seemed more important, like, for me to make as an artist, than it was to make something to make people feel safe right away.