I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
I'm pretty involved in everything I do, which isn't always efficient and doesn't necessarily make for the more successful product. But I do feel that, in that sense, everything I do has a comprehensiveness to it.
My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.
I've read in a couple stories that I was raised Episcopalian, but that's not true. I think that's just people assuming things. In some ways, I wish I was raised Episcopalian. I was kind of raised hodgepodge.
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.
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.
Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
It's hard to reconcile my personal beliefs with an entire institution like the Church or the Republicans. Or with people within those political persuasions who have such different ideologies but confess the same things I confess spiritually.
You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I don't think it's art. I just think it's music. It is what it is.
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.
I have a love/hate relationship with Amy Grant, but I do go back to her Christmas albums once in a while. They're dated and sentimental and the production is nearly unlistenable, but there's something about her vocal performance that just feels really true. I would take her Christmas albums over Mariah Carey's or Destiny's Child's any day.
A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.
I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
