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.

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.

I have a German friend who works on memorialization. The last generation of Nazis and Holocaust survivors are now dying. So literally, we are threatened now for the first time ever, with memorializing that, with no first-person account of it left on earth. There's a lot of worry amongst scholars in Germany about what comes next: "All the memorialization has been done, we've done with everything we can."

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.

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.

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.

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