I don't want to return to places and sing the same songs a second time.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

I like a bass drum. A big one.

I reach out. I ask for help. I tell my story.

There are a lot of names on the credits of 'The Glow Pt. 2,' but most of those people are just on one half of one song or something.

I consume the news daily. I'm not avoiding it.

I grew up without religion, but my parents have always been somewhat mystical about nature: The mountain is looking at us, stuff like that.

I need some time to write songs and work on my thing, but I'm just living my life and doing family stuff and letting inspiration come when it comes. But I also don't feel a desperate need to keep pushing myself into people's faces to stay cool and relevant.

I used to have a musical group with a girlfriend called The Thunderclouds. It was like a Beach Boys cover band. And we would just figure out Beach Boy songs - break 'em into two-part harmonies. And, you know, we played a couple of shows around Olympia. It was very fun.

My first band was called Nubert Circus, a very embarrassing, dumb name. It means nothing. We were kind of grunge. I would say we were more funny punk, a lot of songs about food and stuff like that.

In the early '50s, my great-grandmother and grandfather raised a baby gorilla named Bobo who wore clothes and played with the neighborhood kids.

Usually I work at the merch table until one minute before I have to go on stage.

There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.

I am so thirsty to do my projects whenever I have a spare moment.

I think I'm obsessed with accessibility which is why, when I'm touring, I want to play all ages shows.

I like Copenhagen, just because my shows there have been really good for some reason. Not that I love the city itself, but every time I play there it feels amazing. Pretty nice people there.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

On CBC Radio, the Canadian national radio, there's a show called 'WireTap.' The host is Jonathan Goldstein. It's amazing.

Grief - the actual, natural process of it - doesn't have a schedule that I can work my life around.

My daughter is like a tether back to the functional world, and I'm aware of how helpful that is.

The universe is chaotic and meaningless, and it's good to laugh about it. That's my stance on life, actually. Some people go through life grinding their teeth, suffering and banging their head against the wall. I'm glad that's not the reaction that occurs in me.

I am commodifying my grief, to put it really bluntly. I accept it. And I try not to think about it.

There are some people that are trying to cure death, this tech immortality... That seems mentally ill.

It's challenging to live in Anacortes. I lived in Olympia for five years, went on tour for a year, ended up in Norway for a winter, and ended up back in Anacortes. But I have a long life ahead of me. I'll probably live in many different places, and then die in Anacortes.

After many days of grocery store food, sitting down for a deliberate, slow, expensive eating time can be the best.

It has happened a few times that I've found myself in a surprise mid-tour recording session.

In 2002 I did a big tour of Europe, by train, by myself, on foot, all the time walking from train station to the venue, in a weird town, in a weird country. I'd brought an acoustic guitar with me but it got broken somehow in transit.

It feels weird to play songs that I don't really... feel any more.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

I'm singing these songs about death and stuff. I see somebody who's, like, in their sixties or seventies at the show, and I'm like, 'Yeah, sure. Fair enough.'

Somebody from Pitchfork Festival wanted me to have a Microphones reunion. It's a joke. It's just me.

Twitter is so stupid. I mean, it sucks!

I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer's block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.

I do spend time trying to find good melodies, and I try to remember them when I do discover them. But also it's mostly intuitive; I noodle around with the line until it sounds and feels right.

I sometimes think about the life that my daughter will have with no mom. What does it mean to have a ghost mom? Not that I can do anything differently about it. But it's an inferior version of what we had planned, you know? This was not our top choice.

I always like to play in beautiful cathedrals, when I can somehow get access to do a punk show there.

One thing I've heard that makes sense to me about grief is that there's this conception that it's a thing that you process, and then you're done processing it. But really it's not a thing that has an end, it's just what life is like now. You are living with this now, probably forever.

Eric's Trip is still a huge influence on me. The style of those recordings and the rawness of them is very inspiring. And the density of the distorted parts, amazing.

I'm artistically satisfied and happy.

If I wanted to make big, bombastic, distorted, echo-y, trippy music, the atmospheric stuff, a studio is nice. But it's nice to know that it's not necessary.

I don't think my music is that big of a deal - my entire life is parenting. The fact that I make records and go off and play shows is a small percentage of my day-to-day existence.

It's really hard just making dinner as a single parent, but I'm figuring it out. I just have to be more focused and efficient with my little scraps of time that I do have.

There's a lot of music out there that's like, 'I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black,' and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

Nirvana really touched me as a teenager and started making me pay attention to music as a participatory thing that I could do.

My exposure to independent music was via Nirvana and grunge so I'd never gotten into punk. I don't really like that music of Crass, but I love the band, and I love their way, and their presentation.

For awhile the only thing people were talking to me about my music, that's all they ever said: 'You must be a nature lover. Are you camping all the time?'

It is something I've noticed - that my audiences are young. My only thought has been because I play all-ages shows. Even so, they're pretty young, and sometimes I'm nervous the content of my songs - these weird, ambiguous, philosophical ideas I'm trying to articulate. Are the kids getting it? Is it going over their heads?

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.

I remember discovering that I loved recording - that breakthrough when I was in high school getting to record for the first time.