I went to school for audio engineering, and I was around a lot of sound engineers over the summers in New York, so I'm pretty comfortable in engineering my own stuff.
I came up with a lot of characters when I was growing up that were just creative outlets, and then, at one point, I came across Gus Dapperton in the back of my head when I was making music.
At some point, I kind of went through this weird existential crisis in high school where I was just really depressed.
Some people ask me what instruments I play, but usually I'll just say I'm more of a producer or a composer or songwriter - those are my strongest suits: arranging and composing.
When I first started making music, I was pretty drawn to hip-hop beats wrapped together with super-good lyrics. The most important thing in that is wordplay, so that stayed with me when I started writing songs.
A lot of artists have a super-specific musical hero they definitely try to hone in on. I'm basically inspired by everyone. I don't have one particular artist who I'm super-obsessed with.
I grew up producing hip-hop music, actually. I was producing for my friends, who were all rappers in upstate New York, where I'm from. But in the eighth grade, we had this songwriting contest in our school, and I got really excited about it and actually won. After that, I just kept making music forever.
I went through this kind of existential crisis. I was going through a breakup; I tore my ACL and my meniscus and had to have surgery, so I was out of school for a few months. Then my computer crashed, which was, like, my whole life. So when I came out of it, I started making music that, I think, was the most true to me.