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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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I'm not an amazing trumpet player. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. You shake the trumpet and it starts to vibrate in a ridiculous drunken way, or you flop notes at the right time and you don't have to play stuff that would take seven years to learn.
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I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.
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It feels much more natural to move forward and grow with the instruments I've grown accustomed to. Piano, accordion, brass, ukulele.
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When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.
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I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.
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Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.
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You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.
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I think I spent more time on the mellotron than on any other instrument in the studio, and it got to the point where I was like, "Well, you can't write an entire album on this instrument." But maybe I would!
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After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices that are really starting to burst through the seams.
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I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.
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In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.
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I'm swept along by larger forces out of my control.