Doesn't every band sort of appropriate their influences into what they do? I guess that would be my defence: if you're making something, you kinda can't help being a conduit for other things.

I've had the idea since high school, of writing music just for voices, just a choir. I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing it, but I'd definitely be excited about trying to pull that off at some point. It definitely seems like an older-me kind of project.

Even though there's stuff that I really like that is just a retro sort of style or whatever, I feel like what I'm most excited by is new mixes of things.

I feel like, these days there's so much music and so many bands, that it's exciting to hear when people go through the whole process with their own sort of system of making the music. It gives it a much more personal individual feel, like unique feel, when somebody has a really idiosyncratic set-up, or they just have what might be considered strange ways of going about the process that yields results that are not just cookie-cutter sounds like everything else... and I think that can only be a positive thing.

Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process.

I was really psyched about crooner types like Frank Sinatra or Scott Walker. Something that comes more from the stomach than the throat. There's an emotional thrust to singing that way that I wanted to try on my own. I can't really sing deep and strong like that, but I wanted to just aim in that direction.

I guess I feel like; if you're doing something and people are accusing you of appropriating something like that so obviously, then I would feel like I've failed as a creative person. It's just like stealing something and doing some sort of slight alteration to it - I'd feel like I'm not doing my job as a musician, or as a creative person - if it's just obvious like that.