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 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.

A lot of electronic-based musicians give very low-risk performances, and it's fun to hear your favorite band play live on a big speaker, but the live context is about the moment of risk and that moment of possible failure.

Playing live is so weird because I go out there and I try so hard to give something, which will be recognized. And in turn, something will be given to me, there'll be some kind of shared moment in that. So it's very affectively intense - so much longing and lack of control.

Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.

Have you seen this video of these cows who have been in a dairy farm, a really shitty one, their entire lives, and they're let out into a field, and they're literally jumping with joy? It's crazy. I don't have any trouble completely becoming that cow. There's no "What is it really like to be a cow?" kind of question anymore. There's no question at that moment whether I understand you completely. I think there is, in that moment, a possible total sympathy. Total sharing.

"Everything must change, everything must stay the same." Those are good words to have circling around in my head. I just wish that I was able to deal with them, not by singing, but by helping myself. But singing helps, too.