It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.
So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.
I never fixed a story. I didn't make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.
When you listen to an album, it shouldn't feel like, "That's the girl song," "That's the club song." I shouldn't know what you're thinking while you're making the song. I don't want to know what the artist is thinking.
The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.
I don't really like over-explaining the songs. Everyone constantly asks what the songs are about, and I think the thing is that the songs definitely all have stories in them; it's just nice to let people decide what they are. I think it's important that people hear it themselves rather than having me annotate it.
I always prefer other people's interpretations over my own, so I'm not very quick to make explicit what exactly a song or record is about.
I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.
It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.
I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.
To me, soul music is anything that is made from the heart, and therefore moves the listener; it's not overly self-aware, and leaves room for the listener to make their own conclusions.
I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It's fun to see what they'll say it is.
