The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work and it creates this strange connection. It's really a way of strangers communicating through this third thing, which is a body of work. But really, I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.