Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.
But I studied art in Belgium from the age of 17 to 18, and I learned French when I was there. Very reluctantly so. I didn't do a very good job. For the first six months I was very depressed and couldn't speak to anyone, and then it kinda hits you.
Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
I woke up in London one morning in the middle of an adrenaline surge, and I was just lying there - the sun was coming up - trying to think of the best way to describe this feeling, and 'pang' was the only word I could really use to describe it.
I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.
Everything I've done that I'm proud of is everything I've been the most hands-on with, so I'm just following that, really.
Well, I'm just a really sentimental person, and I just get leveled by things so easily, like from films, to personal interactions, to memories, to music.
I've probably listened to 'Try Me' by DeJ Loaf 500 times. It's a little slower than your typical strut BPM, but it still works.
If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.
You'll see every kind of New Yorker in there. You really feel like you're in the belly of the beast when you're in Union Square.
One of the goals we had when making 'Moth' was to have the vocals sound less treated and less processed than we'd ever had before, to just let them be exposed and very audible.
Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.
I really admire people's interactions with technology that aren't tech-centric but use it as a tool.
Many of the elements associated with storybook mythology and gothic aesthetics are actually not expressive.
My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.
In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.
I actually don't live anywhere. I live on the road.
If I'm receiving an email from a stranger, I usually like it to be properly thoughtful and explanatory, and not just hitting someone up for a casual favor out of the blue who you've never met before. I really believe in manners.
I'm a horribly chronic 'get half way through the book and start a new one' person.
