What my writing is really about

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more

All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work

My job is to be a musician and make music and do what is authentic to me and reflect my inner world in the most personal way possible. In songwriting, the most personal is the most universal. It's about using my own emotions as a connective tool.

And listen, not to get too existential, but that’s sort of all there is to this whole being alive thing, right? We are on Earth for a while. We occupy certain spaces. We meet a bunch of people and make a bunch of decisions that impact both those people and a whole lot of others whom we’ll never meet. And through it all, we get the choice of making ... See more

Meaning and point of view are essential for anything worthy of our attention. It’s about a sense of purpose and personality that goes beyond mere information transmission. It’s about paying attention, and not outsourcing observation. In a world increasingly populated by auto-generated content, the combination of substance and style will rise above