I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.

I felt like I needed to get a few side projects out of my system before I settled in to do the new record. Usually what's asked of you, everything's a year cycle. When you get caught up in that cycle, it can be kind of brutal, actually. It was good I got to take a year off, with no pressure coming from anywhere.

I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.

The greatest thing about my house was that I was in the far end of it and I could make as much noise as I wanted. By the time I moved out, I had a full-sized piano, two full-sized organs, bits and pieces of a drum kit, and a whole computer set up for Pro Tools. I had this mattress in between the piano and the organ. That was the only walking room.

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

I think I spent more time on the mellotron than on any other instrument in the studio, and it got to the point where I was like, "Well, you can't write an entire album on this instrument." But maybe I would!

I was always looking outside of myself for stories and ideas and influences and then I kind of realized in 2010, that all of this time, I've developed a "sound." And I've never fully explored it.