The thing is, when you're kind of creatively self-employed, your brain just kind of chooses the path of least resistance, so if you really exhausted and you've had a long day, then that's typically when you might respond to emails or if you're on a plane and have nothing else to do, then you might listen to music and write these satirical pieces trying to explain the charts with music theory.

What better metaphor for the subliminal state than capitalism? This whole notion that you're trying to do good and make things good for the world, but at the same time the reality is that you have to eat other people to end up on top.

I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.

Regarding gay and music, I don't actually think my music is particularly gay at all, because my music doesn't have sex with men. My music does not have a gender, I don't see it as being gay.

I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.

Discipline is not just about work, but about diet and about exercise and on a deeper level, about concentrating and making sure that my brain is staying in good places and the neurons are firing in positive ways as opposed to getting into anxiety, panic-attack states of mind. When I'm crazy. You know?

I think the cornerstone for my impetus for doing arrangements for people is because I want to be an enabler. That is to say, I don't approach arrangements with the idea that I want to progressive the genre of arranging. I want to be more of an enabler, and if a person is making a record and they have the option of layering some real instruments down on a track and I can be of assistance whether it is brass or winds or stings or percussion then I do so. Sometimes I do take on projects because it is a pretty sweet deal to work with Pet Shop boys, you know?