When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art.

There's a certain fear of simplicity. I think that's the thing when you're younger as an artist you get this idea in your head that complexity equals quality. The more notes you're playing, the better.

I think you can totally be a totally normal kid from the suburbs of Chicago and go off and play shows. It's one of those things that when you go home, you're still the nerd you were when you left, and your parents still get to yell at you about cleaning up your room, and your girlfriend still drags you to the pet store.

The music that I made in my band wasn't the expression of everything I was into. Bands are based on compromise.

We got nominated for a Grammy, that was really crazy, and I was sitting there and Stevie Wonder was on stage and I remember thinking "Wow, I really need to take [singing] more seriously!"

I definitely love kimchi. The biggest influence that eating so much Korean food growing up had on me was that I have no limit for spiciness. The hotter the better.

I love Korean food, and it's kind of like home to me. The area that I grew up in outside Chicago, Glenview, is heavily Korean. A lot of my friends growing up were Korean and when I would eat dinner at their houses, their parents wouldn't tell me the names of the dishes because I would butcher the language.