It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"

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.

Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

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

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

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.