It never really interested me in the past but, for the first time, I wanted to make a pop record. I thought a good way of doing it would be to make songs that didn't really make sense to me as songs; songs that I couldn't just sit down and play in front of someone and then get them to play over it.

The more I abandon ideas of myself as a musician, the better a singer I become.

Even though people like to say Destroyer [albom] is gibberish and all that, I usually know exactly what I'm saying at every single moment.

I'm just kind of lazy and messed up and self-managed - self-mismanaged.

I can't fool myself into thinking that musically I don't need other people, whether it's as a foil or just to come in and make real the ideas that are kind of vague and wispy in my head.

Big, evocative words get thrown around, and people can sing along to passionately as if the lyrics just materialized out of the ether, largely because they don't ever seem to coalesce into a writerly voice.

It's actually really stereotypical that someone should be 40 and mellow out, but I think it's more about trying to conjure up a different intensity in my head, one where I'm more focused as a singer and hands-on with music and more exacting, and less trying to furiously fit a thousands thoughts into a four minute song.