I try not get too self-aware when writing lyrics.

What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me.

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

Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.

There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing.

I don't think the emotional quality is the defining quality of the music but it's definitely something that people have picked up on a lot