I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.