I want to create music that you can just vibe to. Put in your car and just you know like you roll all the windows up and you're like dancing and you just don't know why you're dancing but the music just makes you move.

A lot of stuff that I dealt with - music was my serenity, like kind of my safe place, my haven that I would just use in order to really just get away from the things that I saw every day. To kind of erase the things that I saw. So I stayed playing.

If you have a dream: Number one, make a plan. And then execute that plan. And there will be failures along that line. Don't let that discourage you. Because failure is part of the process ... make the necessary adjustments and you can be successful at whatever you do.

I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

You can describe [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self] as a manifesto of sorts. I saw it as a pivotal turn, a work that really led me down the avenues that brought me to where I am. That picture was the vehicle that helped me clarify a lot of things and I began to understand that I wanted to do.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.