A Quote by How to Dress Well
I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.
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A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.
I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.
You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.
I'll always be making music. I'd like to do it my whole life - although I also love words and want to write short stories. But right now, my songs are kind of my short stories.
I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.
It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
"Face Again" is actually the most George Saunders-y song. Basically the verses, I'm describing a world where love is being killed, and then in the first chorus, I'm sort of protesting it. It's like, "I don't think you know what's best for me." And then by the end, it's like I've given in, and it becomes very desperate.
I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.
I didn't sit down and write a song like, "I want to write a song about this," but I just spent so much time living in this affectively charged space of the live show, with its risks and the incredible reward that comes from people knowing me, recognizing me, affirming me. And then I would wake up in the morning and have an eight-hour drive where I would read George Saunders and listen to Grouper and Pure X. And you bond so much with your tour-mates and your bandmates because it's this weird, quite desperate way of living.
Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
George Saunders is outside of Chicago too. I've met him a few times, actually. I really like him a lot. He's a really sweet guy. He's a big fan of my music now, too. I spent an enormous amount of time reading his work.
That's the thing: pop music has sometimes had a bad reputation for being about a lot of other stuff than the music. And I am just a lover of pop music. I love pop. I love big choruses. Dramatic choruses - they're the best thing in the world. And I do this because I love making music and performing the songs.
[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
I'd usually read the Bible a lot. Read little short Bible stories. And today, whenever I give speeches, I bring up a few of those Bible stories, because those are inspirations to me.
I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.
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