As I've gotten older, I have gotten a lot better at finding the pleasures of making music despite the business of it.

I wanted to touch on the piece where often politicians use "god" to excuse their actions.

When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.

I learned how to have a little bit of distance when I explained songs and a little bit of distance when I wrote them. I think this is more interesting any way in art.

The only really weird part for me was making sense of the person on the TV at the same time as the person who I am friendly with and do something so friend-intimate with as text.

Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.

My approach to writing and recording now is pretty much the same as when I started. Except now I worry even less about what people will think of what I made. And I am not drunk.