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I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn't make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.
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I think in 'No Burden' there was a lot of positivity on the record.
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If there are people who treat me wrong, I either talk to them about it, or I don't talk to them anymore. It's been the most thoughtful and considerate thing I could do for myself and other people. I am going to try to do that forever.
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I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.
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I really enjoy navigating the business aspect of having a band, and there is a great amount of instinct. You don't wanna work with people who make you feel weird, even if they're super qualified.
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My dad plays guitar in the church band, so it's like music as a service. He plays at old-people homes, so that's like music as a gift.
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Every breakup is preceded by a bad relationship. So breakups should be cause for celebration and triumph.
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I don't have any weird gimmicks. I do put on lipstick for the show. That's what separates it. 'Cause I don't wear makeup at all... That's probably the closest thing I have to a routine.
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Even people that are close to me or people that are acquaintances... The only question I get now is, 'How is music going?' It's an overpowering quality of my life now, the fact that I write songs. It's weird to navigate what that means socially.
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My mom is an elementary school music teacher, a pianist, and a singer, and my dad plays guitar - he's a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. My mom does musical theater, too. All of those influences were around.
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I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.
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I'm never writing as a character.
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Yo La Tengo were a major inspiration for me because they're one of the first bands that I got into on my own, separate from my parents, when I was in high school. I have all their albums. That's the place we'd like be in someday.
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When I'm on a stage, it's just me, singing a song with words that I wrote and I believe in. And if I don't believe in them anymore, I'll stop singing that song.
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I'm not a big risk-taker - being bad just wasn't worth my time or the risk of having the consequences for it. So maybe I'm a little bit lame for that.
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I feel like the expectations have gone up. It's not a complaint, but it's a little intimidating. People are like, 'Oh, you're on Matador. It's kind of a legendary label - you're going to have to live up to all those other bands.' I guess it's not that explicit.
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I was adopted, and so was my mom. And so I just was in tune with how life can be intentional. I feel like maybe that helped me to not feel super entitled to a lot of things as a kid.
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For a while, I called myself an agnostic, which was me wanting to maintain a connection to the culture I was raised in while also undercutting a lot of the beliefs I had.
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Questions don't easily die within me until they're answered, and so being able to write a song and put words to complex feelings is part of my process of understanding and letting go of things.
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It's weird to get asked questions that I don't know the answers to... But I like getting questions I don't know the answer to because maybe it's the first time I've been asked to articulate these things.
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Film is like sculpture, writing, acting, technical arts, all sorts of arts. And that's why I wanted to do it for so long, because it would include so many places for attention.
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'No Burden' is not necessarily ferocious.
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I take photos, I used to make films, I journal incessantly, and I really value the documentation of life. Because it's almost like you are making something special by wanting to make it exist in an object - on paper or even just in the computer - making these recordings, making this music.
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Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' comes to mind as an example of a piece of media that I really respect and would hope to emulate: just her courage in looking at her husband's death and the attentiveness that she has in how she looks at it, and the unflinching gaze that she communicates from looking into death.