8. “I Like America & America Likes Me”

Has touring changed the way you look at America compared to other countries?

If everybody did what I did for a job, there would be less of a divide. That sounds like a really fucking massive statement to make, but what I’m saying is: If you do the same thing in different places all the time, it’s exactly the fucking same thing. Every night looks, smells, sounds, reacts, and operates exactly the same way. Yeah, I notice the way that people have darker hair in Mexico than they have in Scandinavia. Of course. But the things that you notice are the similarities. Personality-wise, there’s differences, but we’re all worried about the same shit. Everyone’s just scared of dying!

Your voice is also heavily Auto-Tuned in this song. What do you like about that effect?

Not only does it tune your voice, it stops it, compresses it, punctuates it. It turns it into an instrument. But also, this song started out as an homage to SoundCloud rap. It’s the sound of America to me at the moment. I was almost going to put it out with just mumble lyrics, to see how far I could take it.

9. “The Man Who Married a Robot/Love Theme”

This is a spoken word track recited by Siri about a lonely man who falls in love with the internet. How much do you identify with that character?

Probably more than I’d like to. It’s just pointing out how fucking weird things are by that removal of the human experience—just hearing a robot saying “cooked animals” on this track is a bad vibe, right? Why is it a bad vibe? This is the question I’m asking. It’s the acknowledgement of an already existing dystopian reality. It sounds like a warning of what a future could be, but you realize it’s exactly what we’re living in.

Where did the idea for this monologue come from?

It was going to be my dad reading it and then it was going to be me doing spoken word. But I was like, “Fuck that, sounds lame.” And then we were like, “Who should it be?” We just knew immediately. Because earlier this year, post-rehab, I was obsessed with the 2020s, like the idea that this next decade is going to be some retro-future kind of idea. I had, like, purple hair and an orange coat and I was like, “Everything’s going to be fucking super future!” I was just on that kick. I was like, “Robots, robots, robots.”

As a band so closely tied to the internet, do you feel like this is the album where you turn against it?

I am really just asking questions. What’s weird to me is the stuff that we just get used to. When I first heard that robot voice on OK Computer, it was like, eugh! [jumps back] That’s fucking scary! The idea of a synthesized voice is scary. But now, you could have this track on in the background and not even fucking realize! People put these voices in their kitchen and they’re like, “GET ME EGGS,” and the robot’s like, “OK.”

It’s also difficult because, as a songwriter, it just poses questions. Katy Perry will do a song where she’ll say “epic fail” or something like that, but Leonard Cohen’s new record isn’t going to come out and reference FaceTime, right? But in order to be really, really true about the human experience, he would kind of have to, if he was talking about a relationship: “Oh my love, far away, in a distant land… I could get in touch with you in a second!” The internet has completely changed every perspective of how we relate to one another.

10. “Inside Your Mind”

The lyrics on this song sound kind of obsessive. You seesaw between love and violence: “I’ve had dreams where there’s blood on you/All those dreams where you’re my wife.”

“Inside Your Mind” is just the idea of sometimes wanting to know what your partner is thinking so much that you want to smash their head open to look. I liked that as a metaphor. I like the idea of morbidly romantic stuff sometimes. I explained it to my girlfriend, and she found it quite sexy.

11. “It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)”

This is a song about heroin addiction where you sing about a character named “Danny.” Who are you referring to?

I think I'm trying to consciously hide it behind being somebody else, writing about their struggle and their strife. Like, “So I’ve got this friend, right? And he’s got this really weird rash on his gooch?” [laughs] That kind of vibe. So it’s like, “Well tell your friend that he should...” But it’s quite obvious it’s about me, because there’s been a real reluctance for me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about being a heroin addict for five years—having actual nightmares of the idea of it being uncovered. So there was a humorous reluctance to disclose it in this song.

What were you trying to express about addiction in this song that you hadn’t heard before?

I wouldn’t have written about heroin unless I had gotten clean. “I do it” was never a good enough reason for me to talk about it. I don’t think Kurt Cobain tried to romanticize drug addiction; because he was so publicly the coolest person in the world, and grunge was so dark, he was telling his truth. Whereas Pete Doherty was a different character. That was the thing that I was always scared of—being an obnoxious celebration of that kind of sickness. I just felt so lucky. I hadn’t lost anything really. And that’s normally why people go to rehab, because they lost so much they can’t bear to lose anything else. But I was lucky.