That's another thing in Alice Munro: it's always, like, some middle-aged woman who is going to cheat on her husband, and there's that moment where sh….

Every new generation of smartphone just has a different-shaped button. It's embarrassing..

I think that a lot of dystopian literature tends to be really moralizing and just doesn't tend to give credence to the importance of the sentimental.….

Luckily, like for instance the song "Suicide Dream 1," I wrote it out of such an incredibly powerful state that the melody carries that affect. So wh….

Being on the road, because you do so much waiting and so much traveling. It's not the same thing as being in the same city for a week or two weeks an….

"Face Again" is actually the most George Saunders-y song. Basically the verses, I'm describing a world where love is being killed, and then in the fi….

Sometimes I'll go out to say hi to people, and I'm just not ready for it. It feels too weird, too intense..

I have this problem where I get incredibly, miserably nervous every single show. This is part of why touring is so exhausting for me. I have not gott….

Fiction can produce truth, and truth can be false. What does it mean to say that it's true that, what, two out of six people in this city are starvin….

In Dardenne brothers' films is a really small kind of humanity. It's not like the titanic "humanity" of humanism, it's much more gritty and realistic….

The songs are all indexes of a time in the past when I was writing them..

I think what's interesting about Alice Munro, too, is the extreme mundanity of things. And how even a life reduced to complete mundanity, like capita….

Have you seen this video of these cows who have been in a dairy farm, a really shitty one, their entire lives, and they're let out into a field, and ….

I feel like real thoughts and emotions involve the whole being. And they also outstrip little personal quirks, and they outstrip biography. You end u….

What I'm confessing is that I've grown to a point where I feel like I should have more answers, and I don't. And I still think that applies in the Ge….

Playing live is so weird because I go out there and I try so hard to give something, which will be recognized. And in turn, something will be given t….

George Saunders is outside of Chicago too. I've met him a few times, actually. I really like him a lot. He's a really sweet guy. He's a big fan of my….

A lot of electronic-based musicians give very low-risk performances, and it's fun to hear your favorite band play live on a big speaker, but the live….

I believe, and this is something I also learned from Alice Munro, that there's a moment where the personal becomes totally universal. When you see th….

Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the t….

I do think that we're pretty future-obsessed right now, and I think that capitalism works best when we have a very short memory of the past, when we ….