I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.

I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam [Fogarino]. Greg [ex-drummer] is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."

Basically, every band that makes it has some dude with some sense of business. I don't know if our band would've been so successful were it not for Daniel's [Kessler] insight into how things really work. Daniel was the one who was diligently saying, "We should make a demo, send it out, play shows but not too many shows, get on shows with touring bands that are coming to New York."

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.