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

The group-effort sound in recording of Sea Lion is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. Theres a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.

I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

I never really lived outside of the city growing up, but I'm always looking in between the lines of the city, and I magnetize over to the green spots.

I said I'd stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn't gotten my land legs back at all.

You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that. It's very isolating, and that can be a good thing.

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.