I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris Smuggling bombs for the underground. And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence; He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.

And I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I've written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones.

The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.

When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people

All instruments sound fantastic in a church.

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.