I don't think you need to sound like from where you're from. But I think there is something magical and powerful about encompassing something fully and singularly.

I need a template of a template

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.

There was this kind of wackiness that was really embraced and put on a pedestal. It was before the millennium. We were envisioning a future that was mostly idealistic. I think that came crashing down a little bit in 9/11, or a lot. There is something about Portland that does seem to still exist in this total idealistic world and total idealistic mind frame, and I think that's what Dream of the '90s is talking about.

I would not call myself an optimist, even though I would aspire to be. I am innately a skeptic. There's kind of an incessant dissatisfaction that I have, that I'm always trying to either expose or fight against or wrestle with.

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.

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