sensitivity isn't being wimpy

  "No, I haven't really thought about an audience. This music isn't just for me, even if it's just a crowd of bridge-and-tunnelers at a show. I can offer stories people can relate to. I'm just like anyone else, with a brain, heart, loves, coffee stains, whatever. Anybody who is into music I hope will want to hear me."

"People weren't into it at first. I had to fight to be heard. Then I had to stop fighting. Whole months would go by where people would just be talking. I even got a headache from a performance one time. [What changed?] I learned how to use everything in the room as the music. A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it. So if people are talking, I let them talk. That just means they're part of the music. I even had to learn the noise the dishwasher makes at this little cafe; I had to play in B flat, or it wouldn't sound right."

 "Art works better in places where you are allowed to have your deepest eccentricities come out."

"Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom."

"There are really majestic qualities about people that can be reached through music. People are incredible to me even though I'm healthily cynical sometimes. It's because we are spirits and the whole tension is that we don't know that we are. Yet, music is able to touch this."

"Do you ever have one of those memories where you think you remember a taste or a feel of something, maybe an object, but the feeling is so bizarre and imperceptible that you just can't quite get a hold of it? It drives you crazy. That's my musical aesthetic, just this imperceptible fleeting memory. The beauty of it now is that I can record it onto a disc or play it live. It's entirely surreal. It's like there's a guard at the gate of your memory and you're not supposed to remember certain things because you can only obtain the full experience by completely going under its power. You can be destroyed or scarred. You don't know, it's like dying. Anyway, music is the only thing I've got. It's the only thing that's been really great to me all the time. There was a point where I was extremely depressed and I couldn't go near anything."

"I like the way that songs sort of have light, and sort of travel around despite you. It's good. It helps to have songs that you love, that you can be inside. It's good. It's part of the invention. On the outside of that you can say that I find great joy in the things that are sad. That's the way emotions are in people. They fall down on you and there's no way to get out, except to go through it. There's no way you can control it, there's no essay you can write to answer yourself out of it. It just soaks you like the rain. There's nothing you can do. Then it's gone and then another comes around. But tears are not all I deal with. I'll leave that to the next album.”