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.

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.

I had identified discipline as a really important part of my life, in maintaining my sanity. It's kind of interesting when people don't know me and then get to know me and see just how workaholic I am and how unhappy I am when I don't have something to work on, or if I am not provided with the tools to be able to accomplish those things, like touring without my looping rig or without a piano, I'm just kind of like, 'Aahhh, what do I do with my day?' To me, that's just a large part of my sanity.

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.

I've always identified people's taste in music as being kind of hetero and/or homo - there's music people like because they feel like they have aesthetic similarity to it and the music they wish to create, and then there's music that represents the other, that they listen to because it represents an escape from the music that they have to make.

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