I'm swept along by larger forces out of my control.

I was a very good student until about sophomore year, and that's when I just became so disillusioned with the whole thing that I just became an awful student. I was still making good grades. But I was cutting class three days a week and faking papers that I got off the internet.

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.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

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

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.

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.