I like to think that location, travel, etc, is a launching point for purely imagining.

As much as I try to grow as a lyricist, I tend to laugh at even calling myself that, because I think that my actual talents lie more in arrangements than they do words.

It feels much more natural to move forward and grow with the instruments I've grown accustomed to. Piano, accordion, brass, ukulele.

It's funny because you do often read in recounts of very famous albums, people tend to focus on mistakes in really positive ways, and there's certain mistakes of my own that I always do find on every record that I needed to accept. I find it really interesting to talk about. I always write songs at the wrong tempos, and I have to learn to accept that a little bit.

I think that there's a proliferation of music that is done entirely in the bedroom for an Internet audience, but there's no way in hell that you could actually kill off a live show, and its importance in the creation of music - it's just impossible.

There was always a unique Beirut sound, it was always there, and so this time I just dove straight into that, instead of daydreaming and wandering.

I tried to go to community college for a while, and it's a funny story. I walked into the English class on the first day, and they told us to write about what we did over the summer. I can't remember exactly, but I think I walked out exactly at that point and went to the office to ask for my money back.