I need to go someplace faraway that doesn't have telephones and doesn't have a record player and doesn't have movie theaters and people walking down the street in order to not do anything.

The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up. I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

Sometimes we need to tell ourselves that we're not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.

You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.