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

When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.

I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

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.

In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.

I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.

I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.