These people that worked with my dad doing landscaping were in a grunge band so the music on the cover of Rolling Stone was in a very real way connected to people practicing in the woods near my house while I was home doing my homework.

I do like playing music with other people.

I buy some black metal records kind of blindly, and I end up really liking maybe 30% of them. There's a lot of duds, for me at least, in black metal. I have kind of picky tastes about it.

I wanted to make a record that would transcend the bad, hard feelings of a love relationship not working out, to make something that metabolized it into something useful and good.

I am drawn to cold, desolate places rather than Hawaii. I actually love Hawaii too, but I tend to go to Iceland or Norway or Northern Japan - northern places for whatever reason. Which aren't necessarily the best places to tour.

I've sort of accidentally put myself in this position where I opened up the story of my life, and of course people want to reciprocate and open up to me. I'm OK at it, I don't make people feel worse, but it's strange to find myself in this role, all of a sudden, that I never would have pursued.

I have a hard time working with other people with my own songs because I have a pretty complete idea of how it should be. It's usually just me multi-tracking which is better than coercing someone into doing my idea.

I don't get to make many choices in my life as a single parent.

Being a musician means I am 'hanging out' a lot, like driving on tour or being at a show or whatever, so maybe there's more time to interact with peers and develop jokes.

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands.

It's easy to get swept up in the day to day ridiculous things that are in the news. They're not meaningless, they're legitimate and worth being engaged with. But it's easy to get overwhelmed and swept up and forget what real life feels like.

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.

It's a beautiful idea to focus on how everything is temporary and always in flux. It may feel bad now, but it will feel good later, and vice versa. To write about those things brings this satisfying feeling as a creative person.

I just play under the name Mt. Eerie. I started doing that in 2003 and I've pretty much been doing that since then.

I want to not be associated with death or cancer, I don't want that life.

I like the experience being in the audience and being overwhelmed by sound, like thick, oppressive loud sound and distortion.

After I made 'A Crow Looked at Me,' I remember people saying things to me like, 'You've made a beautiful tribute to Genevieve.' And I felt like, no! No no no, I haven't. I made a tribute to my own destruction and desolation. This is not a portrait of her. That's not who she was. She wasn't just a person who died.

I think that as a kid I was pretty drawn to melodrama.

Every tour is different. Sometimes I'll get a band together and sometimes it's just me.

I love things like the Criterion Collection DVDs. I think those are really well done. I like how far you can push the deluxe-ness of things like that.

I'm pretty open.

I can't bring myself to release an instrumental album because I feel like I want some meat on the bone. Something to chew on, lyrically and content-wise.

Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.

I'm actually not fussy. I enjoy getting into it and talking about anything, really. It feels good.

I am not satisfied with the ending of 'Mount Eerie' the album, so maybe by calling myself that, I am attempting to elaborate on the ending.

I don't want to return to places and sing the same songs a second time.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

I like a bass drum. A big one.

I reach out. I ask for help. I tell my story.

There are a lot of names on the credits of 'The Glow Pt. 2,' but most of those people are just on one half of one song or something.

I consume the news daily. I'm not avoiding it.

I grew up without religion, but my parents have always been somewhat mystical about nature: The mountain is looking at us, stuff like that.

I need some time to write songs and work on my thing, but I'm just living my life and doing family stuff and letting inspiration come when it comes. But I also don't feel a desperate need to keep pushing myself into people's faces to stay cool and relevant.

I used to have a musical group with a girlfriend called The Thunderclouds. It was like a Beach Boys cover band. And we would just figure out Beach Boy songs - break 'em into two-part harmonies. And, you know, we played a couple of shows around Olympia. It was very fun.

My first band was called Nubert Circus, a very embarrassing, dumb name. It means nothing. We were kind of grunge. I would say we were more funny punk, a lot of songs about food and stuff like that.

In the early '50s, my great-grandmother and grandfather raised a baby gorilla named Bobo who wore clothes and played with the neighborhood kids.

Usually I work at the merch table until one minute before I have to go on stage.

There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.

I am so thirsty to do my projects whenever I have a spare moment.

I think I'm obsessed with accessibility which is why, when I'm touring, I want to play all ages shows.

I like Copenhagen, just because my shows there have been really good for some reason. Not that I love the city itself, but every time I play there it feels amazing. Pretty nice people there.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

On CBC Radio, the Canadian national radio, there's a show called 'WireTap.' The host is Jonathan Goldstein. It's amazing.

Grief - the actual, natural process of it - doesn't have a schedule that I can work my life around.

My daughter is like a tether back to the functional world, and I'm aware of how helpful that is.

The universe is chaotic and meaningless, and it's good to laugh about it. That's my stance on life, actually. Some people go through life grinding their teeth, suffering and banging their head against the wall. I'm glad that's not the reaction that occurs in me.

I am commodifying my grief, to put it really bluntly. I accept it. And I try not to think about it.

There are some people that are trying to cure death, this tech immortality... That seems mentally ill.

It's challenging to live in Anacortes. I lived in Olympia for five years, went on tour for a year, ended up in Norway for a winter, and ended up back in Anacortes. But I have a long life ahead of me. I'll probably live in many different places, and then die in Anacortes.