I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way.

I don't think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don't need to have a background in contemporary music. They don't need to go to new-music concerts all the time in order to be able to understand it.

Sometimes you feel some artists are doing the same thing that you're doing but in a different field. But they have the same approach. Their method of research and gathering data is the same as yours.

I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that's within all of us - all the things that they've listened to in the backs of their minds, whether it's country music or minimal techno, or classical music or whatever. I want them to bring that excitement, that love, or that hate, or whatever it might be, to my music. I feel that my music draws on so many different things.

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.

The goal is that people will find something of themselves in it. But you don't need to know what a hexachord is! You don't need to know what serialism is. You don't need to know anything technical. It's more about the state of mind of being open and listening to what's really going on. And I think that the more open you can be, the better. So maybe it's not good to have expectations.

I feel like there's not this black-and-white division between concert hall music and music that bands play in a bar. I don't know if this was ever truly the case, but I don't feel that I need to decide between playing for a sit-down, totally silent audience and playing for a bunch of noisy, drunk people in a bar. What I do with the group is somewhere in between.