I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
I have a love/hate relationship with Amy Grant, but I do go back to her Christmas albums once in a while. They're dated and sentimental and the production is nearly unlistenable, but there's something about her vocal performance that just feels really true. I would take her Christmas albums over Mariah Carey's or Destiny's Child's any day.
I come from a folk tradition where you just dance however you feel comfortable.
I'm a very self-conscious person; I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances; it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.
Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.
Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
Audacity is central to everything I do. A lot of times I think my work is about just seeing if I can get away with it.
I wouldn't mind being popular in other ways, but not with music.
I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.
It's hard to reconcile my personal beliefs with an entire institution like the Church or the Republicans. Or with people within those political persuasions who have such different ideologies but confess the same things I confess spiritually.
I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.
I'm pretty involved in everything I do, which isn't always efficient and doesn't necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it.
You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I don't think it's art. I just think it's music. It is what it is.
It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
I think musicians should stay off television generally.
