We are always in a state of flux, and taking risks is important.
— Caroline Polachek
If you want to know what the DJ is playing, just ask. You don't have the right to stick your head in front of my screen as if you're an expert leaning over the shoulder of the apprentice.
I think as I get older, I'm just going to start making smooth, new age music - no joke.
But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.
I think that's a big trope in pop music: the blaze-of-glory breakup. It's not one that I particularly identify with, but it's definitely possible.
Before I play a show, I put on lavender oil - it's sort of a ritual.
I was born in New York, but I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut - that's where I went to school. I remember begging my way into choir in the 3rd grade, because you're not supposed to get in until 4th grade.
I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.
Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.
Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.
Many of the elements associated with storybook mythology and gothic aesthetics are actually not expressive.
One of the goals we had when making 'Moth' was to have the vocals sound less treated and less processed than we'd ever had before, to just let them be exposed and very audible.
I've probably listened to 'Try Me' by DeJ Loaf 500 times. It's a little slower than your typical strut BPM, but it still works.
I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.
In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.
I'm a horribly chronic 'get half way through the book and start a new one' person.
I would enjoy seeing anyone else sing 'Caroline Shut Up.' That would be interesting. I would give that one away, actually, which is funny, even though it's very personal.
I like listening to ambient music, especially in very scenic places because I think it allows for the most freedom of thought.
I really like when the lyrics in the music have an interesting relationship between one another - where they contrast each other.
'Ashes Of Love' has much more hot-blooded vocal than what PC Music is known for, and a much harder production than what I usually do, so I was fully prepared for people to hate it.
Yes, when I come up with ideas on my own, it's almost always a melody, just as often an instrument or bassline as it is a vocal. But it is a single, linear, monophonic thing. Something you could hum or whistle.
I've definitely been in that situation many times - staying in a relationship longer than I should. I think there's so much of your identity that comes from a relationship.
Growing up, I was so compelled by artists whose looks were inseparable from their music. Bjork was my hero.
As soon as we wrote the beat for 'Romeo,' I knew it was a running song. I was thinking about it in terms of the body. What do you want to do? It's not a song you want to dance to.
Low' was probably the album that influenced me more than any other, because of how it combined humor and impressive, glamorous, driving energy with this totally surreal soundscape production.
I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.
Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.
I really admire people's interactions with technology that aren't tech-centric but use it as a tool.
You'll see every kind of New Yorker in there. You really feel like you're in the belly of the beast when you're in Union Square.
Well, I'm just a really sentimental person, and I just get leveled by things so easily, like from films, to personal interactions, to memories, to music.
I woke up in London one morning in the middle of an adrenaline surge, and I was just lying there - the sun was coming up - trying to think of the best way to describe this feeling, and 'pang' was the only word I could really use to describe it.
I actually don't live anywhere. I live on the road.
My mom wasn't thrilled about me being in a band, because she very correctly said she couldn't see any sort of stability in it.
I kind of think that's the best way to operate; even when I'm in sessions writing with other artists, I'm always pulling from the kind of emotions that are the most raw in my own life and offering them up in the studio.
Driving in Chicago wins over New York; people are so fast. It's almost like there's a subliminal street racing culture here. They drive like comic book characters.
But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.
I would love to live in Japan again, but would need to really commit to learning the language before doing it. Both my parents speak Japanese fluently, so I suppose it would feel like a tradition.
I used to obsessively draw. I was really good at it.
I almost gave up on 'Door' so many times. I couldn't crack it. It started out as a simple song with just a chorus-verse-chorus. I felt like it needed to transform more.
I was into music from a very early age, and I was also - I don't really talk about this that much - really into horses. I learned a lot about rhythm and about voice from that.
The men's dance style in dancehall is territorial, but it's also flirtatious and it's also showing off strength by way of smooth movement that you can only do if you're really strong. It has so much attitude.
But I never imagined that I could ever have a career in music. I always thought it was like a mafia, that you had to sell your soul and know the right people and be in the right place.
But I studied art in Belgium from the age of 17 to 18, and I learned French when I was there. Very reluctantly so. I didn't do a very good job. For the first six months I was very depressed and couldn't speak to anyone, and then it kinda hits you.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.
If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.
Everything I've done that I'm proud of is everything I've been the most hands-on with, so I'm just following that, really.
My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.
If I'm receiving an email from a stranger, I usually like it to be properly thoughtful and explanatory, and not just hitting someone up for a casual favor out of the blue who you've never met before. I really believe in manners.
When I was in middle school, I loved Egyptian mythology.
