How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?
I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I saw - we talk about crumbling bridges - I saw one, concrete literally falling onto the underpass below, threatening auto traffic.
It was voters in the Rust Belt that cared about their roads being rebuilt, their highways, their bridges. They felt like the world was crumbling. So I started making ads that would show the bridge crumbling.
We go to the movies to forget about time, to be in a dream state. And it's entertainment, distraction, from the fact that everything is kind of crumbling in front of our eyes.
When the image that I built around the first album was crumbling, it was scary: the risk pays off, but the resonances of that risk are not always easy to deal with.
Who knows what crumbling infrastructure lies beneath our sleeping children? Actually, many people do - they pay surveyors to take a look.
We actually know that our crumbling pipelines, roads, and bridges are ticking time bombs. That is why President Obama and Congressional Democrats have pushed to fund jobs that repair our roads, runways, and railways - we can't have first rate American communities with third-world American infrastructure.
If you go out in the country, spend a lot of time on decaying farms, and you see a lot of crumbling tobacco farms, and wandering the woods, there's something beneath the surface; there's something older... more sinister.
I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.
I don't want to see the dollar strong because the rest of the world is crumbling. I would like to see the dollar strong because the Fed has said it wants it to be strong in the future.
