I was really kind of miserable with myself personally and all of the things that you can be creatively, until someone said - and I don't know what about it made it click at this specific time - but they said, "You're not 18 anymore, and you're not writing songs in your old bedroom. It's work. You should get up every day and set a perimeter of time and start compartmentalizing your life."

I guess I wanted to emulate the artists that my parents were listening to when I was growing up. I've always had this affinity for folk music, and music in general, for as long as I can remember. So as soon as I could start playing shows, I did. And my parents were really supportive of me the entire time.

I had gotten to know the music scene there, and just fell in love with it. I've lived there a little over four years now. There's a charm to Denton. The musicians in Denton are all very talented, but they're also all very accessible and very community-oriented.

I've done four records now, and your idea of what it's going to be for that record is never what it ends up being, so there's cynicism in my outlook but there's also some positive outlook in it, like, "I can't really control anything outside of what it is that I do, so I'm going to do my very best and put my best foot forward in everything that I do." The music and whatever else comes outside of that, if something great comes out of it, awesome, if not, I'm going to make another record and another one after that. That's really all I can do.

Lately I haven't been able to write for the guitar - it'll usually start out with a melody on the bass, and I'll layer vocals. I just can't really physically hear the guitar anymore, so I'll just go into GarageBand and play around with the keys. I'll sit on a melody or some lyrics for a really long time and just play with it.

There's a part of me, and I'm sure every single musician that writes for themselves has this: there's a layer of precious that you have to shed. I'm constantly trying to let go of, "Well, what about this, this would be cool." Some of that is needed, but a lot of it is total BS.

I create my own schedule, so you start out each day and you say, "Okay, from 10 to 11 I'm going to write," and on the dot at 10, I went downstairs, got dressed like I was going to work, and at 11 I stopped. I don't know why, what kind of wizardry about that worked, but having the structure for a month, I was dishing out songs.