Biography

This is sort of cheesy, but I remember after my band Zumpano broke up ..when I was just flailing and I didn't know what to do, I remember hearing that Mama Cass song 'Make Your Own Kind of Music' and it almost made me want to cry. That line about 'Make your own kind of music..even if if no one else is singing along' - I thought , 'Ah, that is so true'. I always try to carry that with me.

Lyrics are the most punishing for me because I always start with the music. It's very important that the lyrics fit around the melody in a certain way. And that makes lyric writing difficult because I can't always say what I want to say, or at least it's very hard to.

I think I'm known for writing these pop songs that have a lot of parts and a lot of chords, and sometimes I try, consciously, to write simpler songs, just because it's not what I normally do. But it's always a strange exercise.

My process is so crazy, I don't know that I even have a process. In a way, I'm always writing. If I'm driving down the road, I might get an idea, so I sing it or hum it into my phone.

When you put something that's honest out there you don't want people to just shrug and go 'Who cares?' Even though..the final song on the record ['[They Should Have] Shut Down the Streets' ]is all about 'Why didn't the world shut down at my mother's funeral?'..Well, because. And the world's not going to shut down because you wrote a song about it.