It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.

It's easy to get swept up in the day to day ridiculous things that are in the news. They're not meaningless, they're legitimate and worth being engaged with. But it's easy to get overwhelmed and swept up and forget what real life feels like.

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands.

Being a musician means I am 'hanging out' a lot, like driving on tour or being at a show or whatever, so maybe there's more time to interact with peers and develop jokes.

I don't get to make many choices in my life as a single parent.

I have a hard time working with other people with my own songs because I have a pretty complete idea of how it should be. It's usually just me multi-tracking which is better than coercing someone into doing my idea.

I've sort of accidentally put myself in this position where I opened up the story of my life, and of course people want to reciprocate and open up to me. I'm OK at it, I don't make people feel worse, but it's strange to find myself in this role, all of a sudden, that I never would have pursued.

I am drawn to cold, desolate places rather than Hawaii. I actually love Hawaii too, but I tend to go to Iceland or Norway or Northern Japan - northern places for whatever reason. Which aren't necessarily the best places to tour.

I wanted to make a record that would transcend the bad, hard feelings of a love relationship not working out, to make something that metabolized it into something useful and good.

I buy some black metal records kind of blindly, and I end up really liking maybe 30% of them. There's a lot of duds, for me at least, in black metal. I have kind of picky tastes about it.

I do like playing music with other people.

These people that worked with my dad doing landscaping were in a grunge band so the music on the cover of Rolling Stone was in a very real way connected to people practicing in the woods near my house while I was home doing my homework.

I got into Nirvana, and it was my sort of awakening into the idea that music could be like rough and crazy and local. And so I started to realize that there were bands playing in my town, Anacortes.

I'm mostly fine with anyone using my music for whatever. Everything's just compost that gets reused.

Music is only good sometimes.

It's nice to have a band that can adapt to whatever show we're in, so we can play on a big stage or a house show.

Life here (in the Pacific Northwest, not in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland or the chain of buildings connecting them but in the rest of the place, out west and east from the north-south I-5 river) can sometimes feel like a half-dream, half-myth.

I listen to all kinds of music and sometimes I try to do something that's referential to an era or a genre, but it still sounds like me.

I want to create a life that is just healthy and peaceful - an enclave, really, of retreat. It's not helpful for the big picture. It's totally selfish to run away like that.

The Beach Boys were my favorite. I use to listen to their hits over and over, especially 'In My Room' and 'Don't Worry Baby.' There's something really sad about 'Don't Worry Baby.' Even though it's just a California song about racing cars, the melody is really sad. There's melancholy in it.

People used to assume I was a serious/sad person because of my music for some reason.

It's interesting to think about the different forms one place can take.

Even when I was calling myself the Microphones I only really ever played new songs... because I feel, like, a pretty strong connection to the song when I'm performing it.

My shows have never been related to my albums at all because my albums have all kinds of crazy instruments and stuff that could never be performed live. I'm used to people expecting this 12-piece band to show up with three drum sets and an accordion.