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.

There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There's instrumentation, there's timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples are used, the way the electric guitar is used. I'm thinking of things that are particular to this era. But I don't always feel particularly close to the music of my peers. I often feel that I have more in common with writers and visual artists. I try to connect to people in an emotional kind of way.

For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.

If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as a string of unrelated events, then the question doesn't come up.

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 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.

There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where nothing happens, where really nothing happens, so you become a different person after hearing eight minutes of exactly the same thing. Yes, I hear music all the time in which one idea is strung together to another idea, and I feel that such music is non-narrative.