What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it's the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do.

I feel as though I came to music with something to say. It wasn't like that when I was younger. I didn't have the ability to articulate what it was I wanted to say.

I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

I think, because of the kind of writer I am, I can't do it halfway. I can't do it without dedicating my entire life to it. I have to give it a hundred percent.

Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life.

Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I'm gone.

I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.

I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there.

I'm a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It's more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I'm never going to try to compete with great singers.

When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.

Food rules. Little rivals the pleasure of tearing into a glistening burger.

My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly, and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort.

In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.

I was born in Korea and left before my first birthday.

I find texting to be kind of a safe space.

Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.

'Emergency Contact' is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions.

Manhattan, after eight years here, still reminds me of Hong Kong. There are parts of Chinatown that are the spit and image of streets in Wan Chai, and I am held in thrall by the Chrysler building as much as I was by I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower.

The notion of this 'emergency contact' is, Do you have someone who is holding you down? Do you know where to go if you're feeling bad? I keep likening it to assigning yourself a godparent of your choosing.

I am obsessed with Neil Patrick Harris on Twitter.

Never post anything personal to your Facebook wall. Or anyone else's, for that matter. Only snitches and teachers look at Facebook.

I'm just going to write whatever I'm going to write, and whatever shelf or section they end up on at the bookstore is just going to be that, and I'll let the marketing people pull their hair out and worry about it.

Pirates, me hearties, are the Patronus of the freelancer.

I'm pretty sure I peaked at 15.

'Sorry' is unlike anything Bieber has made in the past. It has been classified as 'tropical house' and 'dancehall,' but everyone seems to agree on one thing: It's a banger.

Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle.

If you are someone's emergency contact - you are their person, and they are your person - there is work involved.

For my first job interview out of college, I wore a cream-colored cotton suit with cap sleeves and an inverted box pleat skirt that was appropriate for the late-August heat - and wildly discordant with the Red Hook offices of the graffiti magazine I had called twice to find.

When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins.

Aside from the can, everything about LaCroix is gentle.

Pedicures are disgraceful.

When I moved to New York City from Texas at 22, amateur hour was over. As a newly grown-up person, I vowed I would wear dresses and skirts, wool trousers occasionally, and heels always.

I suspect that living 24/7 in workout attire is the clothing version of the messy topknot. We all know that your hair is dirty, or too long, or too frizzy, or your roots have grown out, but we are all going to accept it as fabulous because that's the deal.

If you're holding your iPhone, and it's the newest iteration of it, you're like, 'Oh, famous people have my phone. Captains of industry have my phone.' And that can be an intoxicating experience for someone who is going off to college for the first time.

People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at.

I am anti-Halloween.

Nothing is more untoward than a grown man tasking another with snapping a pic expressly so he can 'flex the 'fit.' It's tacky -self-aggrandizing - and speaks to an existential neediness typically reserved for failed actresses and phenomenally successful rappers.

Texting is incredibly anxiety-laden, but I know people who will have a full-blown panic attack if you call them. I'm one of those nightmare humans where the little mailbox has an ellipsis on it because I have 1000 unread emails. So texting is the most immediate yet least anxious of all the incredibly anxious ways that we talk to each other.

Learning to ride a bike in a public park means anyone can see you.