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I write one step at a time, always finishing off the part I'm working on before even thinking about the next part. I need to hear it all together before deciding what goes next. I even mix before moving on...in other words, I write by recording.
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My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player. One of my earliest memories is him kind of forcing a guitar on all my brothers and me. You know, "You have to practice three hours a day!" I hated guitar at the time. I kind of picked up trumpet to spite him.
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When I came back to America, I realized that world music is no joke, it really has a lot to it.
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I love the community and the entertainment too much. I'm used to it - it's what I saw first.
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It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'
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I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.
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I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.
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It's a weird thing to be nineteen and be in the public eye. It was a crazy thing, it was a big deal to me, and it changed me in a lot of ways. And now that it's five, six years later, I wanted to look back at that, the start of it all, the excitement and the naïveté about it, and it just fascinated me to reflect on all that.
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I was a very good student until about sophomore year, and that's when I just became so disillusioned with the whole thing that I just became an awful student. I was still making good grades. But I was cutting class three days a week and faking papers that I got off the internet.
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I'm very flash and burn - the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the best idea, and that's because it should come out of a natural place, and if you don't do that then you're writing someone else's music, not your own.
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I try to shut my brain down as much as possible. And let the melodies flow, if possible.
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It's just not an image I had ever put out about myself - the bedroom synth guy. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.
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I fell off a bridge when I was 14, then had surgery when I was 17. Now my left wrist is an inch-and-a-half shorter than my [right one] and doesn't quite have the mobility to wrap around a guitar neck without a bit of pain.
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I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.
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My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.
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I dropped out of high school and I tried to go to community college for a little while. I can't be a student. I always hated that lifestyle.
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What was pretty crazy was to plan a wedding around a tour. It felt very getting-hitched-in-Vegas style. It was like, we played a show in Salt Lake City, ran to New Mexico, we got married, and then I was off to Lisbon.
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The greatest thing about my house was that I was in the far end of it and I could make as much noise as I wanted. By the time I moved out, I had a full-sized piano, two full-sized organs, bits and pieces of a drum kit, and a whole computer set up for Pro Tools. I had this mattress in between the piano and the organ. That was the only walking room.
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I spent my entire life working with the smallest budget I could get. Just working with old, junky, donated equipment. The only things I bought myself were the trumpet and the $9 ukulele.
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I was always looking outside of myself for stories and ideas and influences and then I kind of realized in 2010, that all of this time, I've developed a "sound." And I've never fully explored it.
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I'd been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure touring and stress.
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I tried to go to community college for a while, and it's a funny story. I walked into the English class on the first day, and they told us to write about what we did over the summer. I can't remember exactly, but I think I walked out exactly at that point and went to the office to ask for my money back.
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It's a little cheeky; growing up in Santa Fe was kind of a weird experience, because it's such a touristy town. So sometimes it feels a little like you're in a town that's just on display. You walk around downtown and all the shops are galleries or high end boutiques, so it can feel like you don't belong there even though you are from there.
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I put myself in the studio and I really made sure to say, 'Well, if I would normally reach for a trumpet, why don't I reach for the next nearest instrument instead?'