One of my favorite songs is “Blue Lips,” a slow building tune with lyrics about all things blue. Can you tell me what that song is about?[...]Well, that’s really hard for me. I don’t really think of songs in those terms. I don’t sit down with an agenda and go, “I’m going to write a song about…” you know? I just start playing a little bit on the piano, and then I start singing a little bit, and then it’s over — and there’s a song. Sometimes, very rarely, I can trace the ancestry of a lyric, and I’ll be like, “Oh, it’s a combination of that person I saw in the street and that one painting I saw in a museum, and that one movie I saw,” or something like that. But for the most part, it’s not really clear even to me. People think that if you can’t explain a linear meaning, then the song’s meaningless, or that you just put words together because they sound nice. But it’s not that either. It feels completely meaningful — it all means very exact stuff. I even feel like it’s super important to use “a” instead of “the” in some songs, you know? I’ll be moving tiny little things around in my mouth, and then I’ll get them just right and it sort of freezes — and that’s fate.
On “Folding Chairs,” you bark like a dolphin.[...]I love making noises. It comes out of the fact that when I started writing songs, I loved Radiohead, Tom Waits, and the Beatles, and they all have these sounds, these clangs. But in my early stuff, and especially my performances, it was really limited to just me and a piano. I have this natural desire to just climb out of my skin and become five people making noises, orchestrating all these parts together. I could have just sampled a dolphin, but barking is so much more fun to do.
The album is definitely all over the place. But compared to your other records, it feels more upbeat. What’s making you so happy these days?It’s so funny that you’re saying that, because I was like, “is this the heaviest record I’ve ever made?” I have no grip on reality. I’m so non-objective. Ah, the world is sooooooooo cool. Some of the songs are older than those on [2006’s] Begin to Hope, and some songs that are older than [2004’s] Soviet Kitsch. I have so many songs and I just try to collect them all, and glue them all together. And they span eight years. Some were written two weeks before the end of recording the album, and some were written eight, or five, or three years ago. It’s funny when someone will say something like, ‘Oh, you sound like you’ve grown so much, you’ve matured so much musically,” then reference a certain song I wrote when I was 18. Hey, maybe I was more mature then.
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