Being raised on a boat felt like it was totally normal to me. I was just another kid hanging out, doing this and that. My girlfriend and I had a funny period of time where I was always wanting to hug her all the time. I looked at my brother and he's the same way. It wasn't that our family was necessarily more affectionate than others. It was that we were basically sitting on top of each other, or side by side squished in together all the time. Because the boat was that small. It became part of our nature to be close to people.

I did one year of school and I was doing correspondence school, which was actually another happy accident. Correspondence school is basically home school, but you teach yourself instead of your parents teaching you. I found that to be one of the most important things in my life is that I learned how to teach myself things. I feel like that's something that schools should actually teach.

I remember being on Hawaii when I sailed to Hawaii. It felt unsettling to be walking around there because I was thinking, "This place could just sink at any second." In actuality, it totally can. But it really felt like, I am this teeny, tiny speck out in the middle of all that water, I feel so unprotected right now. It almost felt creepier than being on a boat, which is an even smaller speck out in the middle of nowhere. But I felt like I had some control over that situation.

The amazing thing about the cistern is that, if you're improvising in a dead room, you play your note and then you're left with your thoughts and you have to be really quick on your feet and be able to move through many different musical thoughts seamlessly. Improvising there is just, like, you play a note and then you had at least ten seconds to think, "What would be the perfect accompanying note to that?" And then you could add that note. You can just build this puzzle that was really amazing.

One interesting thing - I play bass and guitar and stuff like that. I know those instruments really well. But I don't know how to play clarinet or trombone or any of these other instruments. I don't actually know how to play ukulele even though I've played it a lot in the past. Because of the weird tuning it's not exactly like a guitar. That's one of the reasons I like that instrument - it makes for surprises. It's not so predictable as the bass or the guitar is for me.

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz.

People always say that music is a universal language. It was very, very true. We could show up anywhere with any people speaking different languages and we could just be like, "You want to play that song? Yeah, okay." We would usually want to play Latin American songs, and they would usually want to play Santana or Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that. So we would trade off. So yeah, we were able to make a lot of friends that way and meet a lot of local musicians. It was a great experience.