There's nothing better than not knowing what's going to happen until you put the pieces together.

I wrote the album [Metals] in the fall. In about four months, I went from zero to finished. It usually takes forever.

Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

Gatekeeper was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I havent written many like that.

I haven't been living anywhere because I've been on tour for the past two years.

I spent some time in France, visited Egypt and Mexico City. I hung out, biked around, planted some tomatoes. I did everything except wake up in a new town everyday. It was really boring. It's just life.