I love playing guitar every night, and to be at this point where it's like, the songs are done and I'm happy with the way they are on record, and I get to hear them be reinterpreted by the live band? That's kind of the icing on the cake. It's the best.
When I was a kid I was definitely into Neil Young.
I love Tom Petty the way a lot of people love him. He's got so many amazing songs, and you know them by heart. They're classics.
I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.
Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.
I've never set out to do anything other than get better at guitar and record and have fun. I feel like the Jazzmaster's just your comrade on that journey. It can be really subtle, it can be angry, it can be chill. It can be anything.
I try to just keep chipping away at, you know, this little idea you may start with and then work on something for seven, eight months. Eventually it just kind of turns into something.
I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.
That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.
I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.
When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.
I love when things can repeat and you can make things slightly different each time and just react to the music and react to the recording.
If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.
I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.
I try to take whatever I can from the songs I grew up listening to, these vibed-out pop numbers, and make them my own in some weird way.
You can't really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I've loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.
When you make a record, you get to live in an imaginary world where you have the best kind of band on every song.
Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.
It's cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter's purview as well as an exercise, I'm trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.
In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.
