The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen.

I don't mean to sound like a cheap prostitute, but you can call me what you like.

All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.

I do an hour's yoga and go running every day. Then I see a picture of myself and I still look like a skinny, potbellied idiot - and I thought I had turned into this superhunk!

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I'm the only person who can't understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they're not that great. These are questions everyone has.

So what Ghost Stories means to me is like you've got to open yourself up to love and if you really do, of course it will be painful at times, but it will be great at some point.

The lyrics just come out, and I don't know where from. I'm an incredible failure in relationships. I think there's a romantic ideal that I'm aspiring for. I don't know. The lyrics are always about unsuccessful relationships. They're not all about the love between a man and a woman. It's about friendship and family. Deep down there's a lot of talk about general existence.