I believe, and this is something I also learned from Alice Munro, that there's a moment where the personal becomes totally universal. When you see that person in their pathetic moment, that's the moment where the completely unifying sympathy with that person is possible - where you're no longer a person here and they're someone over there, and you can really feel like one, you can really feel like a human being. Or more like, you can really feel like flesh and blood, because I feel like that moment is the same thing with animals.

I think what's interesting about Alice Munro, too, is the extreme mundanity of things. And how even a life reduced to complete mundanity, like capitalism taking over rural Ontario or whatever, has complete sway over aspects of life. Nevertheless, people still have these moments of weird desperation, weird longing, weird true love, or weird, powerful lust, and that was a major inspiration for me, too.

Traveling is amazing. You meet so many great, positive people. You get to see new faces all the time. I don't think that loneliness, it's not like you have no one in your life. Well, I'd say it's like . . . you can have everyone you need in your life and still be lonely. Everyone knows that. Being on the road is complicated and shitty; it's also really, really rad.

The interesting thing about doing press is that I learn what the album is about - I now know, a year later, looking back, what was on my mind at the time.

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.

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.

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.