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.

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.

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 started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

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.

When I'm recording something (especially because I produce my own music) I might consider how hard it would be to replicate a song on stage.

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.