I'm a terrible sentence finisher. I think that's why I'm a songwriter. When you write a song, there are no rules, and I think that I talk as if there are no rules. But then I run this great risk of no one understanding me at all.

I do experience something pretty commonly with every song; there's some moment where it clicks into its own life with its own emotional impact that I feel, and even though technically I'm the one writing the song, it's like watching a storm come in.

I do notice that my songs fit all over the map, even in terms of the colloquialisms in them. The songs come out with their references intact, almost unheeded by me. It's like they existed somehow before they met me with their relationship to the tradition, and then they just end up coming through me at that moment because of my relationship to some certain kind of music that I've listened to in my life. I know that sounds a little bit woooey.

I do feel songwriting is a bit of its own creature and the writerliness of it...it's freeing. It's good for people who have an innate resistance to any restrictions whatsoever.

I identify as being an independent artist. I think people often forget that Indie is actually short for independent. For me, the word has a meaning more than what it connotes from an industry standpoint.

Sometimes I joke around that if I weren't a musician, I would be a power lifter. I don't think people expect it from me because I'm little.

There is a very palpable difference for me between some of my earlier songs and where my later work has gone. If I were making my dream set list for tonight's show, I'm probably not going to include a whole bunch of stuff from the album that I made when I was 23.