That moving a lot really committed me to stability and committed me to ... being in control of my destiny. That was something that was very important to me. And it also made me very conservative about money.

In the series I’ve got massive slabs of dialogue so I had to understand the scientific principles involved and then fake it to credibility.

Well, the reason I’ve survived for this long is because any film composer that has an extended career learns to work within deadlines. The deadline becomes the motivating factor in the same way that a pro athlete can do these incredible things with two seconds left in the game. It forces them into their best mode. For film composers, the clock does get us into a higher gear.

It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.

I don't write as often as a lot of artists I know. I save [my songwriting] for a period of time, so I bank up a lot of ideas and a lot of feelings, and then, not even necessarily on purpose, it becomes an album.

I think now, especially with Love & Hyperbole, I was like, let me just write the best thing that I can make for myself. Totally intuitively.

To just chill out and not worry. Growing up, I worried about every little thing. I was like, "oh I'm not good enough, I'm not confident enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not this and that." I would cry about my appearance, and cry about a bunch of things that don't matter to me now. I would just say, the stuff that matters now won’t matter in a few years, and just chill out and enjoy your life.

People think that to be a pop star you have to look a certain way. I want to show people that there’s an alternative.

I had a bunch. When I was young, I really loved the Black-Eyed Peas and The Gorillas and bands like that. And then as I got older, I discovered Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill and older singers like Etta James. I gravitated towards a lot of young women who just played guitar and had great voices and wanted to emulate them in whatever I did, so they really inspired me.

That's always been a tough thing. I've always struggled with staying present and not worrying too much about the future or the past. I'm always either dwelling on the past, or missing the past, or worrying about the future. So that's been a big challenge, because this type of lifestyle goes extremely fast.