Adam Granduciel

I work off of my early demos. I'll keep adding on top of that, but I usually gravitate towards whatever that original idea was.

I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.

If I improvise vocals at an early stage of the song, I just kind of listen to the roll, and then I kind of have a little vocal hook.

When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.

I think where a lot of the stuff came from is that it started as something else and then it was transformed into something that worked in the context of a song that I might have been working on.

That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.

I was a bouncer, if you can believe it for a while in a sports bar. I let everybody in.

I try to just keep chipping away at, you know, this little idea you may start with and then work on something for seven, eight months. Eventually it just kind of turns into something.

I've never set out to do anything other than get better at guitar and record and have fun. I feel like the Jazzmaster's just your comrade on that journey. It can be really subtle, it can be angry, it can be chill. It can be anything.

Every show with my Jazzmaster is like a new show.

I like that kind of classic-type sound. A lot of my favorite albums were tracked live, with a four-piece band. I love the way those albums sound, but I want to make records that sound like that in the way I like to make stuff.

I love Tom Petty the way a lot of people love him. He's got so many amazing songs, and you know them by heart. They're classics.

When I was a kid I was definitely into Neil Young.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

I just want to make that my life: recording music and trying to write a good song every day.

I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.

I never have a clear goal or a theme when it comes to writing an album.

It was definitely strange to come home and all of a sudden have to shift gears into creative mode. I kind of had to figure out what it was about music that made it exciting, and question what it was that made it worth sacrificing all the other parts of my life that weren't as satisfying.

My siblings weren't playing music; I was the only one who wanted to buy a guitar and was listening on headphones the whole time.

I immediately felt welcomed, whereas in Massachusetts, I'd grown up there but I felt like such an outsider. Within a week or two of moving to Philly I felt there was something I could be a part of.