Whenever I work on a project I put all of myself into it.
I don't have to just have one kind of life. I can have several different creative lives.
I tend to use different microphones, different mic techniques, and different recording mediums - like analogue tape - that evoke multiple eras of recorded music at the same time.
I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.
Yeah, I'd always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar.
I feel like when I was in college I was listening to the Walkmen a lot and I actually have a memory of having a dream and in the dream I saw the Walkmen perform with saxes.
Shangri-La is one of the few studios in which you can sit in the control room and open a window behind you. You can feel the light and the air coming off the ocean. You can have a musical world in front of you and the natural world behind you.
In the West we are constantly hit with music of Middle Eastern descent signifying terror, intrigue or sorrow.
I've had experiences where my life will try to tell me something in a dream and sometimes it's something I'm not ready to hear.
The original 'Don't Let It Get to You' started with a beat. The drums came first. All the musical and lyrical elements were written over those drums.
I'd like to make an album with Slack one day. I'd like to use it as a collaborative tool. I know about it because I have friends that work in tech, and I guess you can use it in any job.
I think that all music is inherently political, and, at the same time, I'm interested in the politics of inclusion not exclusion. So I think that my goal is to make music that anybody can hear and feel moved by.
I think when I work with artists, I'm at their service, and I'm at the service of either their vision or a vision that we find together and we share.
I like there to be some secrets.
I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don't think I'm gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don't know I'm Middle Eastern and do the same.
I feel like I've had this ability to infiltrate, as an outsider and an insider, different groups.
I'm not interested in anyone who would want me for the wrong reasons.
When I work with other artists, I really want to bring out the most in their voices and I want to hold myself to the same standard.
There's a bunch of rules that I want to break. I have a rule-breaking streak.
On the song 'Step,' the chorus is Ezra is singing into my laptop with the laptop microphone, and you can hear the trains going by my apartment, but we liked the quality of that recording.
