I have this problem where I get incredibly, miserably nervous every single show. This is part of why touring is so exhausting for me. I have not gotten to a place where it's like, "All right, here's another." It just doesn't feel workaday, at all, yet. It's kind of killing me, being so nervous so many hours of the day. After the show - we try to end on an anthemic note, and I try and let that be decisive, and I will often come back out for an encore a cappella, and that's where I try and take leave from the feelings of the stage. Trying, after I do that, to return to my life.

As someone who listens almost exclusively to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, I definitely like "No Bullshit" by Chris Brown, and melodically I'm really into what he's doing - that song is kind of singular because it's got this piano intro and outro. But obviously I'm not singing about what he's singing about. What we want out of our songs is not the same thing.

I have this problem where I get incredibly, miserably nervous every single show. This is part of why touring is so exhausting for me. I have not gotten to a place where it's like, "All right, here's another." It just doesn't feel workaday, at all, yet. It's kind of killing me, being so nervous so many hours of the day. After the show - we try to end on an anthemic note, and I try and let that be decisive, and I will often come back out for an encore a cappella, and that's where I try and take leave from the feelings of the stage. Trying, after I do that, to return to my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.