I have noticed that these days, people don't want to take their time to succeed.

A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.