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.

When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin.

I fell off a bridge when I was 14, then had surgery when I was 17. Now my left wrist is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my [right one] and doesn't quite have the mobility to wrap around a guitar neck without a bit of pain.

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

I didn't realize how different our band's senses of melody actually were. I would write a part that just made perfect sense to me, but for them, it was mind-boggling. Likewise, they could play stuff with relative ease that I never could have. If there was something lost in translation melodically, it wouldn't work at all - we'd just be 17 people in a giant room staring awkwardly at each other. When that happened, I'd go home, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then return to smooth sailing.

I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.