Quote collection
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"I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith."
"Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it's like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It's never going to satisfy me."
"I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all."
"The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the US. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last."
"Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating."
"We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are."
"I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own."
"One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk."
"Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation."
"Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people's pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce."
"It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog."
"I think that music has always been restricted to media. The LP is an antiquated form, and the CD is now an antiquated form, and there's no sense grieving. Music is forever, there will always be songs. It's exciting that we're not limited to the media any more. I don't hold a precious view of my work, that it exists outside of social constructs or the confines of a platform."
"I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there."
"There's a sense of urgency in understanding that your body is not really your own. We can control it to a certain extent through habits and good behavior, but there's so much we don't have control of."
"The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment."
"I want to throw my voice more, I want to manipulate melody more... I want to be less deliberate and mechanical... I want less melody."
"There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything."
"I've been working a lot on figuring out how to sing differently and better. I want to become a better singer. I want to sing out more. I want to me more extroverted, vocally."
"I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks."
"Yes, the kingdom of Christianity and the Church has been one of the most destructive forces in history, and there are levels of bastardization of religious beliefs. But the unique thing about Christianity is that it is so amorphous and not reductive to culture or place or anything. It's extremely malleable."