While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
We legitimately walked into 'Anthem' head-on, not paying enough attention to internal band tension.
It feels weird to play songs that I don't really... feel any more.
Writers are completely out of touch with reality.
I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the '80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!
You can make an album, and people won't get it. Or won't connect with it. Or won't - whatever is going on in the universe at that time, it doesn't really register.
We don't sing about eating local produce or growing beards or anything like that. It's funny to find yourself in a position where people associate you with things that are completely arbitrary to your songs.
For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
A lot of the time, I don't actually relate to what I'm writing about in pop songs.
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.
You want to reach people, but you also want to reach them in the most authentic way. You now have a mass market and an audience that's listening, but they're in love with a song that means absolutely nothing to you.
What I liked so much while shooting [a movie], I might not like anymore when I see it or vice versa. The two are connected but not on a causal level.
When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
When you're not as accessible, you get in a tent and get in your own head, and you start doing things that are a little out of touch. I think we've seen it happen with certain artists... people can't touch them; they're not touching people. They're only touching people in their circle.
I think sometimes I might scare the editors, because they might feel they're getting old and they're not understanding it. The problem lies on their side of the fence, not mine. I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era.
The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died. They haven't a clue, and they don't care. You tell them that, and they go, Yeah? So, your point is?
That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.
Interestingly enough, there is a really different dynamic when you're directing something that somebody else has written compared to when you're directing something that you've written. And there's a good and a bad side to it. I think the bad side is that you never feel the same level of connection to the material - you just don't.
I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.
There are some millennial artists that I totally get and understand, and I know what they're talking about. People who I've worked with and who I'd like to work with. But there's a whole element of artists that I can't explain what they're talking about.
I have produced things that I would say were sincerely cheerful. But then I am reminded by other people that no one else would see them that way.
