I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.

Every time I think that I've pierced through the simulation, every time I feel like I've written something authentic, it feels like I then sort of lose my footing with it.

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.

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.

The songs are all indexes of a time in the past when I was writing them.

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.

Every new generation of smartphone just has a different-shaped button. It's embarrassing.