The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

I've met so many amazing fans in the couple of weeks since the release of my second album, and everyone keeps telling me they feel so connected to the record. I think as an artist, all you really want out of your album is to feel like you're not alone.Because you wrote it for a reason. You wrote it because you're feeling some kind of emotion that you had to get out in the world. And if fans say, "that makes me feel like I'm not alone", then you get to say back to them, "Well, you telling me that makes me feel like I'm not alone either".

Anyone who has been with me from the beginning has worked from the trenches with me and they've worked really hard. People that I have brought in where I am now, they haven't worked the way that we have, they haven't lost the sleep, and you know, the blood, sweat, and tears.

It can be difficult going through a period of time where you feel depressed because it can become your identifier. In the sense that you wake up, you're depressed; you talk to your friends, you're complaining that you're depressed; you talk to your parents, you're unmotivated. You know what you could do to try to overcome it - although obviously there's no cure - but you start to feel like, 'what will happen to me if I feel better? Who am I when I'm happy. I'm so used to feeling like this.'

There's a booming, rotating, never sleeping city in the center of my brain and no body can come in and I can't escape. I have a strange sense of pride that my brain works that way, but I'm also terrified of what would happen if I ever tried to think in another way.

Before Guadalcanal the enemy advanced at his pleasure - after Guadalcanal he retreated at ours.

I wake up every day and think about what I am to other people. What I am to the people I employ, who depend on me to wake up and do my job that day and keep this career going? I think about what I am to the kids who listen to my music and all the other people involved in this project.