Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together. Technology has a lot to do with how the world is developing at the moment because there are very raw and pure and primal emotions that people are communicating to each other over the Internet. It's like our new feathers, our new face paint. We're still trying to find love and friendship and cool music, but now it's over the Internet.

Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could be only moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.

Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together.

[In making music] it's nice to not have a goal, to not have a set format. It's very liberating to just get out of your comfort zone and be in a new space.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

Maybe I bring people into that pop world who don't usually find themselves there because there's not enough stuff for them to get excited about otherwise.