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

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

Lyrics are what I tend to tear hair out over and they're where I tend to feel weak musically, if I'm being very honest. It is not something I feel like I know anything about; I would not consider myself a writer. I just want to sing, I just want to sing a melody, I just want to feel a melody, and be part of the song, and everything else is not so important.

After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.

If every element of the song doesn't come within the first hour of writing, then you're never going to get it - if that makes sense. It's kind of like you need to be in a mental state where everything is so reactionary that you don't double-think anything, and so if it's not immediate then it's probably not going to happen at all, and you should probably toss the song.

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!

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