Thanks for doing this!
Are you kidding me?
I know that you've already done a Tape Op thing recently...
I'll do it again and again.
Awesome. How do you see some of the aesthetics or the process that you learned at art school showing up in the way that you make music today?
Well, the school that I went to, which was Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC, they were really good about making sure that the big question that you understood was, you know, "Does my piece – whatever it may be, art, music, performance, animation, paintings, whatever – does my piece say to the audience what I'm trying to say?" They want you to try to figure out what it's like for people viewing it from different perspectives. To see it from every angle, to weigh whatever the details are. I dunno. Of course, it depends on how heavily you cared. "Is my piece really saying anything, or am I just doing it for fun?" Sometimes you are just doing it for fun. You try to be several people at the same time. I think writers, people who write novels and who write fiction, want to be everyone in the world. They want to be like tourists in other peoples' existences, which can be a problem, but it's also a really pure want. It's based on compassion for people and interest in people and excitement. Not just people, but like you want to be a tourist in the life of a tree for example. You can do those things. I don't know. That's where really exciting ideas come from. Ideas make other ideas, and it's this crazy rabbithole you can go down. Ideas breed like rabbits. This really is going somewhere, I swear to god. You also learn there, or at least I did from my particular institution, what it meant to make an honest assessment of yourself and figure out how it was you worked and how to be your own boss as in figure out what your disciplines are, figure out which circumstances contribute or detract from what you're doing, how you deal with distractions, you know, what's your optimum work environment? What do you have to do to whip your ass into shape, basically? You learn how to structure your life if you want to be an artist or a creator of any kind. That's probably the most helpful lesson I've learned, because you can apply it to everything. I think that education, a lot of times, can be a real waste of time, but I didn't have any parents, and I didn't have any sort of structure growing up, and I really needed it to go into adulthood. I kind of used art school as my parents, but my super freaky, free-thinking parents. I don't know how I would explain that. If I were to give advice to a younger person, I'd be like, find someone to apprentice with; someone you admire. If you have to do it randomly at first, do it, but find out what you like and don't like. Your input really matters. It's really good to figure out how to be humble and take criticism and have people say, "No, that's not right," to you. You can use your own opinion as to whether it's right or wrong. But I've learned so much from people. I wouldn't be anywhere if I didn't take it on the nose sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Do you have a routine?
Well, there are so many different pieces of being a musician and a producer. Sometimes we're on tour, and that is super structured. I'm not good at being a boss of that, so I hire several bosses to be my boss in that instance. Rachel is my manager, Luke is our tour manager, and then I have the booking agent, etcetera etcetera. I'm not doing it alone at all. There are a lot of people who are really great who are setting things up and making sure things move smoothly. In the songwriting process, I work with less people. I write songs on my own sometimes, but I don't really like it. It's possible, but I never got into a band because I wanted to be by myself. I wanted to be with people, and I wanted to be in a gang. I wanted to make big sounds, which of course you can do on your own, but I enjoy the back-and-forth with other people and that cool plate spinning that you do with other people, that weird connection of making a circuit, essentially. Then in the studio, it goes all different ways. On this last record, I did about half of the record with Björn Yttling. I worked in the studio with a lot of people as well as him, like Thom Monahan, who's an amazing engineer and just a wonderful person to hang out with.
Thom's the best!
Oh my god, isn't he the best?
We get together every time I'm in L.A. We have long sushi chats.
One of my favorites.
He's just a great guy to call and have a conversation with and shoot the shit with and talk about ideas. That's what I love about Thom.
Yeah. He's a rare person. He reminds me very much of my songwriting partner, Paul Rigby. They're both in their 40s, but they're both as excited about music as they were when they were 13. It's like ideas and sounds are so exciting to them. They're not ashamed to just geek out. The geeking out is the funnest part, and they know it. I think the whole worried about being cool thing goes back to what I was saying about you can't be afraid. If it's early on and you're starting, just admit you don't know everything. In the world of audio, I've noticed people are sometimes very strong about their opinions about gear or the way to record because they want to look really knowledgable, but it's just silly. It's silly.
Yeah. I can recall earlier on both in playing music and in recording like really trying to do it "right". "Am I doing it right? How's my time? How's this, how's that?" Now when I give advice to young recordists, I'm like, "Just plug stuff in and blow stuff up. Explore and make mistakes." The idea of the perfect mix and the perfect sonic balance and this and that, I'm not discounting it, but the idea that you can't make something cool and creative because it's not 100 percent technically proficient, those things don't have to go hand-in-hand. That's a super important lesson for young people.
Yeah, right. Also like sometimes the heaviest opinions are totally based in fact. But they're also the most expensive ones. Like, "You're not gonna get those kind of warm sounds without the Neumann microphone" or whatever. And it's absolutely true. The Neumann is like the greatest microphone, maybe, but I don't like using them! I have a very nasal voice, and a very loud voice. I like the Audio-Technica 4050. And it's not considered like a super-fancy Telefunken, you know. You're like well…
It works!
Yeah. And I enjoy working on huge desks as much as I like working with an ADAT, which people think is just a joke, but I loved recording with the ADAT, because I'm so fucking ADD. Pro Tools, I understand in theory, but I can't keep track of all the menus that are hidden all the time, and like the tiny things that are checked off. I love having every track where I can touch it. It's all visible, all the time. It's very simple. Arm it. I think that's totally valuable too.
Absolutely.
I am sure working on the Neve console is the greatest thing ever, but I also get the same amount of joy working with the ADAT and you know, it doesn't matter.
Sure.
A lot of us don't have that kind of money, you know what I mean? Frankly, when everybody was telling me to work with a Neve console, I just liked the SSL so much more. It's like, I know I'm supposed to like that more, but I really prefer the SSL! And that's the right answer. Everything's a right answer in a way. And I was young. I'm not immune. I was guilty of adopting other peoples' opinions as my own from time to time. I was like yeah, "That was just kind of a dumb thing to do." You've just got to own it.
That's just growing up. There is like a giant need to sort of be validated. With the way that the internet is today…
It's really up to you and what's working. You don't have to die on the Neumann hill if you want to try other microphones.
You mentioned the idea of creating something and trying to see it from the audience perspective or having that be part of the process. It seems like that's a tough one.
It is a tough one. Basically, I look at it with the aspect of, "Have I left enough holes or entry points so that the listener can make the song their own? Have I been not specific enough about certain things so that the listener can make the song about them?" Does that makes sense?
I think so.
For example, classic love songs. They don't mention a pager necessarily. They don't stick themselves to one specific time period so much. It's more about the feelings and the passing environment and the ambience.
They're more timeless.
It's an emotional like gray area that stamps a kind of chapter heading that a person can always refer to. When they hear a song they always loved as a teenager in a restaurant, it might make them cry. It's that weird, how do you get into a person's subconscious, but not get into a person's subconscious exploitatively? Like kind of getting in there more lovingly. Does that make any sense? I want people to be able to wear it like their special punk rock vest that they personalize. I'm also into super-specific songs that are about one thing, but I like writing stories more and trying to comfort people and make people acknowledged or valid somehow.
Are you conscious of that when you're actually in the writing process, or is that just sort of inherent to what you do? Great songwriters that reach a lot of people have a way of being universal with their message in some way.
Universal's difficult. There are people who can do it, and I'm not saying I'm one of them.
It may not even be intentional.
Editing yourself is not necessarily about editing what you're talking about, but trying to say it as elegantly or with as few words as possible, or as awkwardly and as with as few words as possible. To just get that little in-between space that you can't explain, like you have to make up a new language. It'll click with people sometimes. That's a really magic connection to have with your audience. When you're out on the road and they show up to see you play, you can play that experience. We don't play alone. We play for people. It's like harmony singing. It's this really incredible ability that human beings have as natural creatures in the wild. We're pretty amazing when we want to be.
Yeah.
So just setting up those places where you can use your instincts that you maybe have forgotten about, or this just sort of raw, human feeling and connection with other human beings. Trees, even. I don't know. You can connect with whatever you like.
I want to talk about that. When you were in the last Tape Op piece that we did, you talked about harmony, and you talked about vibrations. I was talking to my wife and telling her what you had said about the harmony, and she goes, "Oh, you know, there's a study they did that when people sang together in groups, it releases oxytocin which is the same hormone women get when breastfeeding, it helps form bonds and relationships, it's a pretty magical thing." I thought that was a pretty interesting thing to talk about. There's a mental aspect of songwriting, lyrics and all that, but then there's an actual physical reaction that people can have to music.
You talked about it. "Hey, I want to be in a band. I want that feeling and create that circuit" as you said just now. I think those things are all related. Some of it seems super new-agey in a way.
It does, but I think that if you think about it from the stance that people love to watch nature shows for example. Studying animal behavior is addictive. We are fascinated by what they do. Watching BBC Earth or something and seeing how an ant communicates with a tree to make sap, all these crazy things. I think a lot about horses when I'm working on vocal parts, because horses have one of the most sophisticated methods of communication with each other. When I try to describe things to people, I often use horses, because horses are led by a dominant female. Horses are like, they do a thing that's a lot like murmurations of birds. The horses are always keenly aware of what the lead female is doing. She can signal a huge group of horses simply by turning one ear slightly. They're completely attuned to her. They move in the right way. They do what she says. It's not that they don't cross the line or challenge her or whatever, but it's a way that they communicate that's really subtle and really beautiful. Humans have that same ability. We just don't study ourselves that way, because we have this fucked up Victorian view of human beings in Western culture where we're not actually animals, and we're totally removed from the animal kingdom or nature in general. It's a huge problem, because I think it's one of the reasons that we don't understand things like climate change. "Well, it has nothing to do with us," you know? So just the way these natural ways of communicating affect fight or flight, or like we say a lot, what can one person do to change the world? Those little tiny signals are what are so fascinating, because I think those little tiny signals reinforce other peoples' beliefs, and they reinforce a feeling that you're not alone, or a signal to move in a certain direction. That doesn't necessarily mean a physical direction. That could mean a just, where are we going as human beings, or I don't want to feel alone, or I don't know, there's a million ways to sound new-agey about it as you said.
There is a concept about positive vibrations and all these things, but then you really look at it, and it's like wow, it's a super-important way that people connect and bond on a non-verbal level. You hear that harmony and it makes you feel emotional and it makes you want to cry. Interestingly enough, the study showed that it was elevated levels of oxytocin, especially in improvised music, that excitement of creating improvised music with others.
Yeah, that excitement of hitting it!
Having that communication on a level that wasn't verbal.
It's like you turn on a switch in other people that they didn't know that they had. It's a switch that makes them feel very alive and very capable and very effective. Very important and useful. Like, "Wow, I have these abilities that I didn't know I had!" It's like runner's high. I think that's another one people talk about, exploring this really powerful physicality that you turn on with a sound, rather than running three miles or something. It's really exciting.
I think it's exponential when you're doing it with other people.
Yeah. And you don't have to be able to sing well. People talk about not being able to sing, but there's a thing that happens when huge groups of people sing together too that does the same thing. A large group of people singing together makes me ball my eyes out. Just that sound that everyone's making together. It has nothing to do with ability. It has to do with intent, which is everything. That's another thing I learned from horses. I have a horse, and when I first got him, he was really kind of standoffish. I was going through a crappy time in my life, and he was just getting to know me. He wouldn't engage with me. He wouldn't let me catch him a lot, until I found out that I had to learn how to put my stress down. I think that's why they use horses for therapy animals a lot, because they understand PTSD and they can really read underlying or non-subtle feelings of anxiety. They live on anxiety because they're herd animals. I was able to practice putting down my anxiety and moving forward on my own time with him. Then sure enough, these things started working, and he would engage with me. It wasn't something I would have been able to do with other human beings in a therapy setting, even though logically you understand everything that people are saying about that, it's really hard to put into practice, because you have to try different methods. That's why the whole singing thing is a way to practice having that connection with other people.
I like conversations around collaboration. I think that collaboration is such a great part of record making.
There are a lot of people who want to strangle their own record, because they want to take 100 percent credit and be involved in every single little nuance and veto or approve or not. I think those are the records that you probably don't want to listen to as the creator down the road.
I'm a control freak, and I'm sure that's how I became involved in every little part of what it means to be a working musician. It took me a while, but I did learn to cede control or go, "You know, I'm a shitty, shitty tour manager," or, "I don't have time to book my own shows, so why would I do it when there's this person who's so good at it over here who believes in the project?" So you're humming along and making this thing and being like, "I need to be known for doing the bass line on this song." Then I'd get somebody to do the bass line like Joey Burns or somebody who's really great, and I got a whole other idea! It becomes this pyramid. It's like those mirrors in Egypt where the sun would come down and hit one mirror and hit another mirror and light up something on the inside of the pyramid. Ideas make other ideas. Or sometimes when you're making music, you need the thrill of a musicality that you didn't expect. That's what working with other people gives you. You can hear your song as a song. You're not so deep inside of it. There's camaraderie and the laughing and eating lunch together. All those parts are so important. I never want to get stuck again in feeling like a project is a beginning and an end, and I'm trying to get to the end. It's a time in your life. I've had times when I've been really depressed and having a hard time. Just motor through to the other side. But it doesn't feel right. Not that people can help it when they're deeply depressed or having a hard time, but you feel like you're letting the people down who are there with you, too, aside from yourself. Who you always put last, if you're like me. Well, it doesn't matter what I think. But you are important in your own work, and you should be having the time of your life! You should be going in the bathroom and freaking out, like, "Oh my god, Garth Hudson is here, and he just played the piano, and I just shit my pants!" And you should feel super cool while cleaning yourself up after shitting your pants. You should be relishing every second. It's such a beautiful job!
It's important to find joy in those relationships and opportunities.
Yeah, but to not beat yourself up when you're slogging and it's really, really hard and you feel like you're giving birth to the albatross. There's another thing I learned in art school, which is, "Did you push the idea far enough?" Sometimes you don't say what you want to say to your audience because you didn't push it hard enough. "How much further can this idea go? How much more embellishment can it handle? Did I push it far enough? Did I edit it down enough?" There are so many ways it can go. There is a lot of like giving birth work that you have to do, but it's worth it.
Sure. You talked about balance. What do you do when you're not making music or on tour, or making a record, and what would your parallel universe life look like?
I really like being in the dirt and being at home with my animals. I like hanging around in the forest. I like making things. You know, art or practical things, like just painting your house. I like making food for people. One of my favorite jobs I ever had was I worked at Hattie's Hat in Ballard, and I made the soups. I loved making up soup recipes, and I loved that I could be thinking about someone else's health and getting a good meal without ever meeting them. It was like a nice way to give love to complete strangers.
It's sort of like what you do with making records, right?
Exactly.
It's the same thing.
You know what, maybe this is going to make your day better, just having a good bowl of soup. It's really simple things like that. But I also would love to travel and be a historian, because that's some pretty exciting stuff too. I have option anxiety.
There's lots of jobs. How many parallel lives are you allowed?
I don't know!
I like how you talked about being in the mix or in the mixing process, and you find a little detail you want to bring out, and how that starts to dictate the rest of the mix. How much of that are you doing when you're in the mix process?
Well, it depends. There's definitely a part of the mix process where I'm making sure I go through every guitar part and every keyboard part, because while they're happening, I'm listening. Say somebody's finger slips off a key or slips off a string and makes a beautiful little moment, I want to make sure those things are still in there. I love the "humans were here" moments. I don't like perfect takes. I don't like drums to click track, for example. I like a natural speed-up usually or a natural slowdown. But I just want to make sure it all makes it, especially the stuff that sounds kind of fucked up. I don't want it to be like, "This song is a video game I'm getting through." I want it to be like it's a little story or a novel or a trailer for a film, or something like that.
I went back to your earlier records. They were very Americana / country records, and Hell On is not really that at all. It's like an art-rock record. You get to 2013 and things are starting to morph a little bit. How did that happen for you? Was it boredom with what you were doing, or did you start listening to other music?
No, there was definitely no disrespect to what I was already doing. I think it's just a human morph. It's what we do. We're growing. I just love sounds. I want more sounds. I'll bring back some of the sounds from a long time ago. For example, I still work with Joey Burns and John Convertino a lot, because they are amazing at just doing something that swerves off the beaten path. Thank you for calling it art-rock by the way, because that makes me feel really good.
The choices that were made are bold and cool. Knowing how people make records, you had more choices. I'm sure you had more choices in terms of drum tones. Where those things [like the drums] are sitting in the mix are cool choices, and the let the story be told in a way that's cinematic and more orchestral.
It's almost like I got to be a dating app, like I was a matchmaker. Okay, Matt Chamberlain is of course going to make the soundscape of drums that's going to sound incredible, and then I'm going to tweak some things and get it over here, and now I'm going to give it to Lasse Mårtén, who mostly works with Swedish pop music. He's done some really big records, and he's like, "I haven't worked on a record that didn't have click track in like seven years." It was so much fun. He's a natural musician as a mixer. So he and I worked on that together, but I was more the matchmaker, and those two kind of communicated through me in this weird way. It's almost like you're an operator in the old style, where you're connecting this person with this person. You want to make sure in a situation like that that you give everybody credit where it's due. There's something to be said about being able to record yourself and write all your own songs and make your own record, but I mean, what, do you get extra money if you do that? Maybe, I dunno!
People make money doing this?
I paid for this record and it was expensive! I really want the best people possible. I'm not going to mix this by myself. This cost so much money. I'm going to hook up the Matt Chamberlain vibe here with Lasse Mårtén, and I'll put my two cents in here and there, but there's a time where you stand back and say, "That's beautiful." It's heartwarming!
That's production. I was recently working on a record with Matt. I think he had just come back from Craig [Schumacher's] place, WaveLab, and he was like, "We just sort of played. It was a lot of experimentation." Is that how the record was created?
Yeah, it was a lot of experimentation. Some things, like for example, the song "Oracle of the Maritimes", I had written it much earlier, so I had time to work on it with the band and play it on the road. That one was a little more straightforward. I kind of knew what I wanted. The wildcard on that was Joey Burns. He had only heard the song maybe twice, and he came in and played an instrument he doesn't normally play. So that's to me when it really gets magical. It's like, "Ooh!" Sebastian and Matt have a really good connection; Sebastian Steinberg. We worked really hard on it, and I think it was kind of frustrating, but I'm an idea pusher, so the frustration is just part of it for me. I hope they will forgive me for that.
Can you give me an example?
Just feeling like, "I almost have it, I almost have it, I'm not sure", and then doing a part over and over and over again. That can be a lot to ask of people when you haven't worked with them before, so I hope that they will forgive me for sometimes laboring too long on a certain thing. I try to think about if I worked with me for the first time and didn't know me and stepped away, I would wonder sometimes if any music had just happened and if there was anything we were going to keep, which is a huge leap of faith. So you know, I'm so thrilled that people are willing to come over.
They're not inside your head. You can see that end game sometimes I guess.
Yeah, but I also don't read music or anything like that. Sometimes people who are trained, it's hard for me to communicate with them what I want to have happen. It's like, "I want it to be greener." That's also a producer and engineer's nightmare. Like, "God no! Don't use a color. Don't use a color on me right now!" It can be really frustrating. But you've got to make up new languages with people all the time. It's really challenging and so worthwhile.
You don't learn a language overnight, just like with your musical compatriots and people you end up developing those relationships with and creating those vibrations with and those magic moments that happen late at night when you're all just kooky and it happens.
Yep.
The magic finger came down and touched the thing, and you're like "What? How did that happen?"
Yeah. You're grubby and in your pajamas and feel like dog shit, and you ate Cheetos for dinner, and then all of a sudden that light comes on and this beautiful specter visits your world, and that's what you've been trying to conjure by making this music the whole time. Those moments are the most beautiful thing that happens in music, I think.
It's why you come back!
In the personal, private, by yourself. Then there's the counterpart which is making a connection with the audience when you play the songs.
Yeah, I wrote this piece recently that talks about just those moments. If you were lucky enough to be in the room and have these moments happen, that's why you're doing this. You're not doing it for money. You're doing it because it's a privilege to have those kinds of connections with people and have it be focused around a project you were a part of, even if it never comes out. Like you said, it's untouchable. "I was part of that. I was in the room. I was there."
Yeah. It's kind of like if you met someone who you'd never met or seen, and they spoke a completely different language than you, which can happen between two people who speak the same language. There can be a massive disconnect between you and I say when we're talking about the harmony singing, and then when your wife comes in, she has a scientific explanation and can use the word oxytocin when I can't! We should never stop looking for those moments, because it's like this gorgeous mystery story that you just get so much out of.
Yes. One thing I saw that just lit the sky up for you recently was this NPR article.
I have a really good relationship with NPR. They have supported me more than anyone. So it's hard to be the person who calls out and goes, "No, we're not that!" But it's also really important to call that out, especially when you respect someone so much. But it's like this thing they're doing to get people to vote on something. And I'm like, "You know, ranking music is dumb to begin with. If you're going with what sold the most records, okay yeah, I get it." But just make a list of really great women, like a database. Like if you want to learn more about quote unquote "Women in music", just go to this database and learn about these people. Ranking us and not including us with men in that perspective is so disrespectful, and it just reinforces this way that we categorize, and it reinforces the way that we don't think of women as being capable of doing the same things that men do. It's absolutely ridiculous. We are so far past that. Let's stop doing that. It would be changing the language slightly, and it seems like such a small thing, but it is not. It is huge. Just do the thing where you go, "Hey NPR listeners, could you tell us your favorite female songwriters we should know about? We're going to put them in this big database or play a big selection of them." It's not ranking them. It's not keeping them separate in that way. Yes, there is a place to have a, "Here's the women who do this" list. Ranking us is fucked up. Keeping us separate from the men in the world of the main current of where music is happening or being made is fucked up. It sounds like a very reactionary thing for me to say, especially since I took part in WOMANPRODUCER. WOMANPRODUCER exists because there had never ever in the history of the world been a conference or any kind of event recognizing female producers in the history of the world. It wasn't like this weird gender thing either. It was female-identifying. Anyone who identifies as female or fluid or anything is welcome. That's another thing that's really, I hate to use the word "problematic," because it's overused, but a list of "best women blah blah blah", is that female-identifying human beings who may be genderfluid or trans or whatever, they get left out. So they just, it hurts them! They work really fucking hard to do it too. When there's no place for you, it feels like shit. I know that from having grown up in the United States of America as a female. There wasn't a place for me, and it fucking hurt. There's a chronic math you're doing 24/7. Not everybody, but I'm like, "Where's the woman there? Where are the women of color? How come you ignore trans women?" I'm always thinking those things all the time, and I'd like to shut it off, but now it isn't the time. I go on about it a lot. Some people think, I mean, I've never been accused of this, but I wonder if people think I'm anti-male or anti male-identifying in that regard, and I'm like, "No, not at all." I wouldn't be a good feminist without all the male feminists in my life who said things to me, like, for instance, my friend Darryl Neudorf who worked on my first records with me, he's like, "What you're doing right now is producing. You know that, right?" I'm like, "No." He's like, "Yeah, you're totally a producer. And here's why." He always encouraged me and always brought up what he thought was really unfair to women in the industry. It was really validating, and you know, he wasn't doing it as quote unquote someone who has a daughter. He was doing it as a human being, and it made a huge difference. I've had a lot of men in my life like that. I've been really lucky. You know, not just lucky. I'm sure there's something in me who gravitates towards that, but I think there's such a disservice to still talk about things like that. As a woman, I don't want to be ranked for shit. Like, I don't ever need to be first place for shit. You get people saying, "You're just mad because you're not on the list." No dude, I'm mad because you're qualifying where Sister Rosetta Tharpe should be when she should be quote-unquote "on the top of the list" with the men. Fuck off! No. I don't want that for anybody. I don't care if I'm on that list. My shit is tight. I've got it going on. I don't need to be on a list. But I also don't need to be in bad standing with NPR. They're my friends. I respect them, and I love what they do, and I want them to get it right. I'm not an expert on how to run a media outlet, but I am an expert on being a quote-unquote "woman in music", and that's where I feel fully qualified to speak up.
Other than time, how can you separate yourself from the producer role and knowing every note and nuance of that record so intimately, to actually listen and appreciate the work as a listener? Is it even possible?
I do that while the record's being made. Generally I don't listen to it for about eight to ten years after that. Occasionally, little bits here and there if I need to learn a part that I forgot or figure out what we should be doing on stage, but I've done that and there's a point where you've listened to something so many times that it just wears out the groove in your ear, and you just can't hear it anymore, so you've gotta get away for a while. Then you come back and you're like, "That worked out okay!" I listened to Middle Cyclone and Fox Confessor, and I felt really good about it. I was like "Yes, that's totally what I wanted to happen, and it did." I feel really good that I can look back and go, "Yes, okay! Phew." To me, it still says what I had to say. I don't know if it holds up to other people production-wise or whatever, but that's not my problem to worry about that. People are going to like it or not like it, but we don't have control over that. We can just do the best that we can. It's such a hard thing to describe, because on one hand, I can be really uncompromising in a lot of ways. I really trust myself, and I know it's going to work out, which makes it easier for me to be experimental in the studio I think. I really enjoy that but at the same time, I really do care like I said, about the audience being able to insert themselves into the story and wear it like their punk rock jacket. So it is again back to balance. It's all about that.
Great. Well, thank you!
Thank you for having me!
