I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.

I think living in Baltimore and being a part of the community and trying to be part of as many communities as possible within the city, the best thing that anyone can do in Baltimore is just to be a part of it and contribute to it and to not see it as...A lot of people from outside the city see this city for its blight and I feel like people who live within the city do the opposite and see this city for what defines it as, in my mind, the most beautiful place to live.

You can have a table full of gourmet food, but the minute you put a box of Entenmann's doughnuts out, that's all people are gonna talk about.

I think the best live shows take you out of the moment into somewhere else and I really...This can be true of recorded music too but my favorite live experience is sort of this transcendendent - is that the word? Transcendental?

Obviously, selling out is an issue but it's almost like an uncanny valley where you can be pretty unpopular for a while but you'll have die-hard fans that love you. Then as you get more popular, it'll be great and people will be excited for you and then you get to this middle-level popularity and people are like, "Oh, you're not famous but you're also not - we know who you are." You're just this like hideous disfigured music.

It's hard not to sell out because once, you know, I grew up with working-class parents who definitely, definitely would be disappointed if I didn't take particular jobs being like, "What are you talking about? I would have worked years for that money in like, actual physical labor." So there's a privilege to not selling out. You already have to be in a position where you can look at that money and not care about it.

I just wanted to make a record that wasn't escapism. Like, I didn't want to write another record that was devoid of meaningful content.