Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

It's just not an image I had ever put out about myself - the bedroom synth guy. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.

I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.

I mean the reason that I started writing close to home, "Santa Fe," et cetera, was a kind of looking back on past events. I don't know, it's just some of the dark spaces I've been. And it feels like with a music career and whatnot, I've been able to crawl out of those places. So it's interesting to look back on them and try to hold on to the feeling of what you went through.

I love the community and the entertainment too much. I'm used to it - it's what I saw first.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.