WASHED OUT

I think '80s pop music subconsciously informs what I'm doing.

In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life.

When I'm not touring, I hardly ever leave my house. Part of it is I get to do what I'm most passionate about, which is work on music and make new songs.

I've struggled with depression before. For me, music was always a very positive way to will myself out of that situation.

The one sound I think of when I think about dreaming is the harp glissando, which is this really atmospheric run up and down the scale that's really dreamy.

I've always written pop songs. I tend to take inspiration from more experimental genres, like ambient music, but at the root of the song, it's verse-chorus-verse.

Over a year's time, I felt like I squeezed in five years of touring experience, which was a really huge help moving forward.

I do try to structure everything in a way that's very much like a pop song. I try to keep the arrangements really simple, just to make everything essential.

I love listening to pop radio.

You hear ten seconds of a song, and you know it's OutKast. There's a strangeness about it because it's catchy, but it's not just pop for the sake of pop. They're pushing the envelope.

When you work this intensely on something, the recording process becomes a bit like cabin fever. I shut everything out and, for a while, I totally lost perspective. To an outsider, I imagine the whole recording process sounds like torture.

The way I work is by infinitely playing a very simple loop over and over, and then I start layering things.

I do have the personnel that we use in the back of my head when I'm working, but I also don't want to limit myself.

Maybe in the future, you'll be able to understand what I'm saying. I'm going more for an atmospheric vibe in my songs. And I really don't want to ruin the illusions people may create for themselves.

I'm entirely self-taught, which I think is both a blessing and a curse.

My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of this peach orchard. It's actually Peach County, one of the largest peach-growing counties in Georgia. It's very rural, and there is nothing much going on, so I guess that's had a big influence on everything as far as just not having much to do.

There are things I can accomplish in the studio via manipulation on the computer or some kind of effect that are nearly impossible to do live. On the flip side, there are some things that happen live that can't be pulled off in the studio.

For the longest time, I was trying to be DJ Shadow, I think. But I slowly developed my own style. It was trial and error, for sure.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

I felt like I was building this world brick by brick with each layer of instrumentation I was doing. I could see it growing in some ways. I feel like most writers feel the same way. You're almost living inside of this magic world that you're building.

When I think about making 'Within,' it was not a very fun experience at all.

I don't really write all that well with others.

I try to stay on a pretty normal schedule of nine-to-five.

My philosophy is generally to keep things as simple as possible.

I never wanted to just press play on some DJ set and let the lights do all the work. I value old-fashioned performance a little more than that.