Living Colour’s Vivid was the first CD I ever bought. I had to have it. I’ll listen to that record today and get into that shit. “Cult of Personality” had a great video—I can picture the Spandex, and the bass player had pretty cool dreads, too. The riffs were sick, and the vocal harmonies are dope as fuck. And when the song ends with that J.F.K. sample, I felt like it elevated things and gave it this weird dimension of grandeur. Reappropriating things in a new context is interesting to me—like in Lost Highway, when David Lynch cut back and forth between VHS. There’s something about watching a degraded format within a format that becomes this meta thing that resonates with me. If Interpol ever goes edgy, I’ll be the guy cheering on that sound.

We moved from Plainsboro, New Jersey to Madrid when I was 11. I was being brutally bullied in Jersey, so I was like, “Cool, let’s get the fuck out of here.” Spain was a marvelous place to live. I initially had some culture shock when I saw guys wearing orange pants, like, “What the fuck is that, man?” They dress amazing, but I didn’t get it back then. Within a year, I started to settle in and realized that if you go anywhere in the world and give it enough time, every place can be home.

I had one really good friend in Madrid that I started a hip-hop project with in seventh grade. That was when I was listening to a lot of N.W.A. and Too $hort. We had hip-hop names that I won’t even tell you, but they focused on sex and gross stuff. My buddy would rap, and I was making different hip-hop tracks on a cassette tape, isolating the scratches and cutting in stand-up material from Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay, who I was obsessed with. My mom found our lyric book and she was very traumatized.

I also had a teacher in Spain that helped me and my friends get into Bob Dylan. My dad tried to teach me guitar when I was 7, but it was way too big of an instrument for me. In my classic rock phase around eighth grade, I discovered “Dream On” by Aerosmith, and I could not love anything as much as I loved that song. I wouldn’t get off the school bus until it was finished. I had to learn how to play it so I could get even closer to that music. By the time I learned it, I got a little book of chords, picked up guitar, and made shit up. I never went through that phase of learning full songs, which I regret—it would’ve helped me as a songwriter.