There's nothing that compares to watching that final of Charles Mee’s 'The Glory of the World' play at BAM17 to 20 minute sequence in one sitting. It fills you with a giddy energy watching that. Then, being gifted with the silence that follows...I've never had a theatrical experience like that before, I'm sure.

One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it's really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information.

I've never done a video where I feel like the images have anything to do with my song, except in the most vague way possible, because I feel like the song is its own complete thing. But ideally, a song is a complete sphere like the Earth, where if you were an alien with a huge, huge finger, you could stick your finger into the middle of the ocean and make an impression on it. It’s not an impregnable sphere, but it is a sphere.

All you do is you go back to the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London, and it feels like you're in a spaceship. It feels like you're in 2001 or something like that. It's massive and well constructed and highly technologically advanced and occupied by these wise scientists, engineers, and producers. Listening to it, it just doesn't sound like me - that's a younger self that didn't know who he was or what he was doing. I can't identify with a nebulous cloud.

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.

I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.

I don't know the reasons why something is intimidating to me or disgusting to me and I don't like feeling that way, either. I don't like it when something turns me off, on any level. So, its a matter of saying: Well, I can either sit here and reject, or I can do double-time embracing of something else just to reassure myself that I'm not against the world.