March 5, 2015

Half Of Something Else

This was the first song I ever wrote for Anna and I to really sing together. I love the sound of her voice on this recording. When we sing it live we have a kind of game in which we stare intensely as possible at each other — which is […]
March 5, 2015

Numb

I still prefer the demo of this song to the recording. Dave (Sardy) and I had a series of spirited debates about this song which ended with a compromise and a switchblade being pulled (as a joke, I think). The song is about the mind-numbing process of touring: the endless […]
March 5, 2015

All I Ever Wanted

Steven and I wrote the basic structure of this song in a hotel room in Kansas City. The words were written in the bunk of a bus in Cologne, Germany. I was reading a collection of Milan Kundera’s stories and was struck by “The Hitchhiking Game” in which a married […]
March 5, 2015

Changing

True story: this song was originally called “Something You Own.” It had no guitar. It sounded kind of like Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective or something with all these harmonies and a sort of “umpa” keyboard line. Then one day I pulled out a guitar and an amp, played the […]
March 5, 2015

Strange Girl

The Cure was my favorite band growing up. This song is about the song “The Perfect Girl” — and all those great Cure songs to which I knew every single word — and how much music can mean to you when you’re a kid and how as you get older […]
March 5, 2015

All For A Woman

So much of this record was written about the two and a half years we’d spent on the road after playing shows in Silver Lake, going from living in apartments to living on a bus — and the experience, all of it, was predicated mostly upon the popularity of a […]
March 5, 2015

All At Once

This was the first time I ever wrote a song with any idea that someone might hear it. This whole record felt like a love letter to all the deepest things I love about music. I knew I wanted the opening lines of this song to pair up with the […]
March 5, 2015

Doesn’t Mean A Thing

Another song in which I still prefer the demo version; in this case it was kind of Wilco-y with an acoustic guitar and piano harmonies. This is about my dad who met mom when he got out of prison, trying to stay clean, how idealistic they were, how hopeful for […]
March 5, 2015

The Kids Are Ready To Die

The first of the two anti-war songs on this record, I think this whole group of songs (you could include The Winning Side and Neda) stemmed from a desire to tell the stories of people at war that weren’t being told at home. We had a lot of vets at […]