What I'm confessing is that I've grown to a point where I feel like I should have more answers, and I don't. And I still think that applies in the George Saunders stuff.

In Dardenne brothers' films is a really small kind of humanity. It's not like the titanic "humanity" of humanism, it's much more gritty and realistic. But again, humanity is what unites all the people I'm talking about, and in such different ways. The humanity is in that moment you glimpse someone and have a completely intimate moment with them, and that intimacy is connected to an extreme pathetic aspect.

Fiction can produce truth, and truth can be false. What does it mean to say that it's true that, what, two out of six people in this city are starving? That's true, but that is only true because the conditions we live under are completely wrong - that should not be true, and it is. And in something like Sarah Polley's film, her fictions deliver so much truth. The retellings and the simulations and the theatrical aspects are what deliver all the truth.

I didn't sit down and write a song like, "I want to write a song about this," but I just spent so much time living in this affectively charged space of the live show, with its risks and the incredible reward that comes from people knowing me, recognizing me, affirming me. And then I would wake up in the morning and have an eight-hour drive where I would read George Saunders and listen to Grouper and Pure X. And you bond so much with your tour-mates and your bandmates because it's this weird, quite desperate way of living.

I do think that we're pretty future-obsessed right now, and I think that capitalism works best when we have a very short memory of the past, when we can just go forward seamlessly into a future of ever-new products and ever-new experiences - even though they're exactly the same, just on a watch instead of on a phone or whatever.

I feel like real thoughts and emotions involve the whole being. And they also outstrip little personal quirks, and they outstrip biography. You end up on a really special, universal, shared terrain in those experiences. I think it's available to absolutely every single thing made of flesh and blood.

Luckily, like for instance the song "Suicide Dream 1," I wrote it out of such an incredibly powerful state that the melody carries that affect. So when I produce that affect, that melody, with my body, I'm immediately thrown into it.