‘I was playing all day and night in a kind of fever, throwing in pop, jazz, violin, guitars and polyrhythms, while wrestling with some demons’
We had a family farm three hours west of Chicago, and when I was scoping out potential studio spaces I remembered some barns where my brother and I used to make forts out of hay bales when we were little. One was in rough shape and had racoons living in it, but I got a local carpenter to do the skilled jobs and I did the mundane stuff such as boards for the ceiling. Then I just moved in, but I hadn’t realised how isolating it would be. It was February and snowing and none of my friends had cars. I’d go for two weeks at a time without speaking to anyone. So I started experimenting with a loop pedal, messing around with songs.
I was playing all day and night in a kind of fever, throwing in pop, jazz, violin, guitars and polyrhythms, while wrestling with some demons. In junior high, I was not a normal thinker. I had been bullied and thought I was autistic, so I was unpacking all that in the songs. Sitting in Denny’s diner at 4am would produce some absurd humour: A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left is about a motion I adopted to shake off dark thoughts. People must have thought I was crazy, sitting there shaking my head.
