- I'd never written a love song in my entire life.
Everything that I wrote was usually pretty introspective.
I was writing music about search for meaning
and creativity or these kind of far-off fantasy worlds,
and I think I fell in love for the first time, for real.
This song, like...
It all just spilled out of me.
It was like this completely untapped well for me.
I just felt it all so sincerely when I was writing it.
I was like,
"I wish that I could spend forever
with the person I'm in love with."
This song, "Blossom," was written in a single night,
which is something I've never done in my entire life before.
I was playing with this guitar sound on a keyboard.
I can't play guitar.
Spent, like, 30 minutes learning how to play it
to make it sound convincing.
And once I started singing,
I was like,
"I'm so in love,
and I wish that our time together was not limited by,
you know, the nature of mortality and life on earth."
So the idea of well-wishing somebody
is something that brings me a lot of joy,
and I kinda encourage anyone
who's listening or watching this right now
to just take a second and picture somebody
who you really love and really want the best for.
It doesn't need to be romantic,
it doesn't need to be family,
just someone who you think is awesome,
someone who you think is super dope.
And just picture them
surrounded by friends at their birthday party,
getting everything they want,
and laughing.
And it's just...
It's this workaround for me to feel good.
And so I began this song
imagining that for my girlfriend Rika
and just imagining her with her best friend
and laughing like how she used to laugh with her friends
when she was in high school with them.
She always tells me stories about that.
And picturing someone happy is...
It's just such a nice thing to do.
I think I was a person who,
for a very long time,
was just so preoccupied with the future
or ruminating on the past,
and I really struggled to even take a second
to see what was in front of me.
I would always be thinking about,
like, "What's happening on the Internet?"
Or, "What threat do I need to be looking out for?"
And Rika, my girlfriend, she's, like...
Her natural tendency...
If we're at a party or something
and people are kind of sussing out who's cool in the room
and who knows...
"Oh, do you know about this label?"
She is not interested in any of that.
She's very mindfully paying attention
to something lovely in the room.
It's just her nature.
She's always been a very mindful...
A very mindful person
who pays attention,
and she taught me that tendency.
Fuck time dilation.
I hate it.
I hate this thing that happens,
which is, as you get older,
time feels as though it's moving more quickly.
I hate it.
Time dilation, if you're watching this, fuck you.
I would be happy, I feel, with 80 years,
if it occurred at the same pace
that was happening when I was 10 years old.
But I'm like, "Wait.
It's been seven years since my last album?"
And I don't like that this song
has a sort of unhelpful sentiment in there.
It's very stuck in the problem.
But it's just the reality for me.
I want time to slow down.
Something that I do again and again
on this album, "Nurture,"
is I'm singing through this kind of pitch processing
that it pitches my voice up an octave.
You could say it's like a feminine quality.
You could say it sounds sort of childlike.
It's like this sort of mask that I wear
to get through some vulnerable sentiments
that would be hard to sing in my own voice.
But on the words "I love you" in this song,
that effect turns off,
and just my real voice comes through.
It's one of the only moments in the record
where you hear my actual voice.
I didn't want to hide behind the mask that I do so often.
But I was like,
"If I'm gonna say 'I love you'
on one of my songs,
like, you gotta mean that shit."
I felt like, over the past six or seven years,
I had become so preoccupied with this singular goal
of being a great musician
and being good at the things I'm supposed to be good at
and achieving more and more
and getting more and more.
I think of that as being, like...
Having lost my way a little bit.
You go outside and just pick one thing and focus on it,
it's stunningly detailed, and we miss all of it,
because we don't pay attention.
And I don't mean that in a lecturing way.
It's human nature,
and I'm missing all of it all the time, too.
You can never take it all in.
I had truly lost my way,
and Rika had not.
It just feels like she found a way in,
to speak my language and to help me see what she was seeing.
There's the people who have always been there for me.
I know that above anything else,
above any success with the music
or any kind of achievement,
they genuinely do just want to see me
in a healthy, happy place.
I remember going on a road trip with my brothers.
I have three brothers.
And we were all in the car,
and I was playing them the album for the first time.
And I remember being like,
"Oh, is this about to be awkward when I play this song?"
And then the song ends, and no one says anything.
And I'm like,
"I think this completely missed them.
Like, it's a ballad."
And I look in the rear-view mirror, and everybody's crying.
I think it's because the sentiment of the song
is one, being so in love,
and two, wanting the best for someone else.
This song teases the subject of death at so many occasions,
and it feels like the end is looming over the whole song.
If the conclusion we're coming to here is,
"Let's not worry about the end."
That's what Rika's telling me.
"Let's just try to be happy with the time that we have."
Where does that leave us in the end?
And I think the place that that leaves us is just, like...
Just gratitude.
When I'm writing lyrics,
I'm always looking for that gut punch.
I'm looking for a way of phrasing something
that makes it feel as incisive as possible.
It's like there's this kind of masochistic thing for me,
writing lyrics, where I'm, like...
I don't feel happy to stop working on a line
until it makes me-