I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.

There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.

Drugs are fine for you alone at home, but when it comes to being a family, which a band is, it just messes everything up.

The touring band is DIIV, and the songs are always written with them in mind. But the new record is going to be more "me."

Generally, I think people are just going through the motions now. There's so much stuff that people are doing today that has already been done. I kind of like that new Savages record, but I don't know why they take themselves so seriously.

I've already had a hard time dealing with some of the trappings of success and turned to some pretty stereotypical escape routes - ways of escaping my own reality and falling into some pretty clichéd situations.