As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

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.

From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.

I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

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

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.