“It’s kinda growing pains, really—me coming to terms with the fact that in order to make these animations, it takes a lot of screen time,” VanGaalen says. “I’m forced to sit and be in front of a computer eight hours a day for two months at a time. It’s just not a healthy way to be. My body, you know, like, my ass feels like it’s not even there anymore half the time. So I’m throwing myself in the river and literally bumping my ass down the river on the fuckin’ rocks to wake my ass up. It’s fuckin’ crazy. Ass therapy. It’s no fun to sit. I built myself a standing workstation a couple years ago, but whether you’re standing still or sitting still, sedentary is never good for the human body. There’s a reason animators are super weird and die when they’re 42 years old.”

“I totally love making art. It’s just that maybe I could do it while I was like, swimming,” he laughs.

Of course, it was his partly obsessive tendencies that eventually catapulted VanGaalen into this creative lifestyle. It’s a job where he’s able to create his own universes and characters and inhabit their worlds, and make a living off of it. He can remember the early drawings he’d get in the mail, sent from his dad, a landscape painter, and how they inspired him to set down this path.

VanGaalen mentions that he was at his father’s assisted suicide only a couple weeks ago. “Broken Bell,” from his new record, addresses their relationship and his own anxiety about mortality as he sings, “I sit and do a drawing, a portrait of my dad/I should really visit him before he’s dead.” Death and its strangeness is manifest in a lot of his work, but he rejects the idea that the fascination is morbid.

“It’s not like you’re taught to prepare for your parents dying or your kids dying or anybody dying, for that matter,” VanGaalen says. “I feel like Westerners are kind of in the dark as far as death goes. So I don’t feel bad about that, I don’t feel like death is necessarily a topic that’s stranger than anything else, really.”

As a young father, he’s also now acutely aware of the fact that his kids will get older and one day probably look up everything he’s done online. He says there’s an obvious responsibility involved with that sort of thing in being a parent, but he’s not about to shield his kids from what he’s created, either.

“My art has always been pretty honestly weird, in the sense that if I feel weird about it, I’ll probably turn it into a drawing,” he says. “I feel like that’s okay. That’s okay to expose children to that type of weirdness. It’s not like a vengeful weird. It’s not a hate-filled thing. It’s more of a cosmic weird feeling. So I don’t really feel too bad about it.”