I think filmmakers all secretly wanna be musicians and all musicians secretly wanna be filmmakers.

When I was younger, bands helped me connect to part of my humanity; bands that had nothing to do with anything political helped to form me. There's a correlation in that: If people can connect to music, maybe they can connect to each other.

Whenever you do anything or say anything, you're opening yourself up to criticism. But that's okay.

Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don't have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them.

The film Black Orpheus is one of my favorite films of all time, which is set in Carnival in Brazil.

I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament - Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts.

I think you have to want to be really famous. It's a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage.