A lot of the music I was inspired by growing up - college rock, DIY, what they used to call indie rock - has a value system where truth-telling and authenticity are oppositional with mass media, showbiz, and commerce.

What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.

I do think that one of the best effects the Internet has had on music is that it's allowed these false walls between different music communities to vaporize. We can see that this is a big, complex, interconnected web.

I just have these terrible memories of our first European tour back in 2007. We had hired this van and tour service from the former Czech Republic called Fluff Wheels, and they sent us out with this 19-year-old vegan driver kid who had no money and refused to eat anything.

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another.

I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers.