I'm from the generation that's always been recording, from the very beginning. I learned to play the guitar on the four-track. I started listening to music at a time when people were doing recording at home, when the discussion about songwriting correlated to the discussion about producing and engineering. I think that's a description of my generation.

Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it's like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It's never going to satisfy me.

Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.

I like residing in abstraction.

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.

I think that music has always been restricted to media. The LP is an antiquated form, and the CD is now an antiquated form, and there's no sense grieving. Music is forever, there will always be songs. It's exciting that we're not limited to the media any more. I don't hold a precious view of my work, that it exists outside of social constructs or the confines of a platform.

I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.