I wanted to touch on the piece where often politicians use god to excuse their actions.

As a consumer of culture, I like a wide range of emotions to be touched in art. It's funny but on the other side of it, I do feel that people that are trying to sell culture would like to see a narrower range of expression from their content-makers. Easier to sell I guess.

I always write from rhythm first, so if I need a song fast, I have to start there. Then I just threw some electric guitar at it.

I didn't realize at the time that if I wrote about something, I was going to have to talk about something. A lot. Ad nauseum.

My approach to writing and recording now is pretty much the same as when I started. Except now I worry even less about what people will think of what I made. And I am not drunk.

When I'm recording something (especially because I produce my own music) I might consider how hard it would be to replicate a song on stage.

As I've gotten older, I have gotten a lot better at finding the pleasures of making music despite the business of it.

I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

I learned how to have a little bit of distance when I explained songs and a little bit of distance when I wrote them. I think this is more interesting any way in art.

Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.

I am really pleased to hear each of my songs described as a total surprise. This is what I want!