Every breakup is preceded by a bad relationship. So breakups should be cause for celebration and triumph.

A journal is your completely unaltered voice - it's just for you. And if you know that voice, and you like it, you can bring it out to everyone else, and that's the most honest and vulnerable thing you can do.

I don't retain facts very well when it comes to music history.

I would not say that my relationships are becoming shallow; if anything, some of them are really being tested in a way that I'm so thankful for my friends that call me and still want to talk.

I don't have any weird gimmicks. I do put on lipstick for the show. That's what separates it. 'Cause I don't wear makeup at all... That's probably the closest thing I have to a routine.

I think 'Historian' is ultimately a positive record, but I was a little bit worried about taking people into a dark world. I tried to do it with as much care as possible, but it's not easy to ask people to think about death or loss or confusion.

What's cool about Matador is that everyone I've met there is just so chill and really into what they're doing. Everyone that works there, there's just such a lack of ego, and there's such a commitment to what they're doing. They all like each other.

It seems like there's a real world for new ideas in Philly.

There is no 'stop' - there's always 'go' on both sides: always keep writing, always keep recording. I don't find them to be segmented processes.

When you're a kid, you learn whatever your parents think until you start taking in media. Because all your friends are your age as well, media is the third parent that you ever have. So I think about that a lot, what visual imagery is teaching us, and media in general having a huge impact.

When I finished reading '100 Years of Solitude,' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I got really sad. I thought, 'This will never happen for me, for the first time, ever again.' Then I opened 'Beauty Is a Wound.' It's a completely different story and writing style, but it has a similar place in my heart now.

I heard during our label-searching that some labels hire statisticians instead of A&R people. They'll reach out to the bands that will statistically perform best monetarily instead of going out to shows and having an opinion on which music is good or bad.

People actually tell me that I'm living my dream. And I'm like, 'It's a little more nuanced than that.'

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

My favorite music is when the sound is supplementing the message. I don't think it's dramatic; it's cinematic.

I'm not a big risk-taker - being bad just wasn't worth my time or the risk of having the consequences for it. So maybe I'm a little bit lame for that.

In film school, you get skills, but then you get lackey jobs, working on projects that you probably don't care about. And there's something in me where I just couldn't bring myself to edit some misogynistic rom-com or movies that I would have hated to be a part of. So I knew I just wouldn't get any work because of that.

Writing has never been an intentional endeavor to me. I know a lot of people have experiences and then sit down and try to sort them out through song, but whenever I sit down to write, it comes out hackneyed or overly saccharine.

Film is like sculpture, writing, acting, technical arts, all sorts of arts. And that's why I wanted to do it for so long, because it would include so many places for attention.

It's important for me to write songs that feel good to sing every night and remind me of my core, truest beliefs.

Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' comes to mind as an example of a piece of media that I really respect and would hope to emulate: just her courage in looking at her husband's death and the attentiveness that she has in how she looks at it, and the unflinching gaze that she communicates from looking into death.

The main way that being adopted has shaped my songwriting is that I was asked at an early age to consider the circumstances that led to my life, and in a way, I was introduced to how fragile and unlikely life is from the beginning.

Negativity, in general, is one of the things that holds people back, and you have to see what's holding you back to get away from it.

I can't imagine being in a tour bus. It would be nice, but I think it costs $30,000 a week to rent. And I can't imagine spending what many people make in a year on a vehicle for one week.