13. “Bus Bus Train Train”

Your dog, Joe Joe, seems to float throughout so much of your music. Here, he appears as a taxidermy sculpture in a museum.

He’s my best friend and the reason I never moved away from New York. I wanted to be here and spend time with him while he was still alive. Then he died my first year of college, so I was like, “Great.” That one part in this song came from a trip to RISD—I was visiting a friend, and there was this weird room where they had with all these taxidermy animals. But I also think that line is about trying to find him, and trying to find home, wherever I am in the world. For me, Joe Joe represents home.

So I don’t think that line is morbid, and I don’t even feel sad talking about him, because it really feels like he’s alive. This is going to sound really freaky, but I feel like part of his soul entered me when he died, and now I’m part dog. When I make eye contact, dogs will run, pulling their owners towards me to hang out. I feel like I’m almost one of them.

14. “My Phone”

The message of this one—about trying to keep relationships offline—is super relatable. Do you think love can rise above the need to be plugged in all the time?

Real love obviously goes infinitely deeper than technology, and you should be able to feel loved by someone, give love, and have them trust you without having to constantly be texting. I’m a really slow texter, and I’m really bad at responding to people, and none of that matters when you’re hanging out in person. But as a touring musician, I do spend a lot of time on my phone. So many of my relationships exist there, and sometimes feel like I only have friends because I’m texting them or seeing them on Instagram. It’s a weird way to exist.

15. “Cafeteria”

This is a secretly dark one: There’s all these feelings of doubt hidden right beneath this bright sound.

Lots of life is constantly putting on a brave face and not exactly giving everyone the true experience of what you’re feeling. So my songs are a fun place to sneak in those thoughts, right underneath a happy melody, or make something that sounds like a love song but is actually really sad. And “Cafeteria” is so fun to play because it’s all this bouncing around, and it has my favorite lyrics to sing live: “I had sex once, now I’m dead.” It’s insane to be on stage and see everyone get so quiet after I sing that. I always imagine that people can tell that it’s funny. But in my head, I’m almost waiting, wondering: “Are people gonna laugh at that line?”

16. “The End”

This sounds almost like an old Frankie Cosmos song, like a rough demo uploaded straight to Bandcamp.

I recorded it a day after a breakup, right into my computer mic. It’s pure emotion, and not thought through at all. I hadn’t figured out my future, or plans for later. I was sitting alone in this room that I shared with this person who doesn’t love me anymore, and I was like, “Gotta move.”

Did you try to edit or spruce up the song later?

Trust me, if I had recorded it a month later, it would have different lyrics. Because the feeling was so pure and fast. We tried to arrange it with the band, but I was like, “Let’s not waste any more time on this, the demo’s going on the album.” I had this intense feeling that it had to be the demo. It’s my first ever GarageBand song that made it onto vinyl. It was so exciting when I got the test pressing and heard this. I was freaking out.

17. “Same Thing”

Your music has been described as being like an elliptical, musical run-on sentence, and this song feels that way.

This makes me think of the bio for our press release. We were talking about what should go in it, and why we think that people should listen to this album, and I was like, “I don’t. I don’t care.” [laughs] Ultimately, there’s nothing that makes this album more special than any other of the albums. The idea is it’s another chapter, and there’s gonna be a million more. Yes, it’s special to me right now, but it’s also not as important as the 50 new songs I’ve written since. So I don’t know how to promote it, because I’m a person who’s writing a bunch of music all the time, and I’m hopefully gonna do it for many more years. This is just one episode, and I think that’s cool!

18. “Vessel”

How did this become the title for the record?

I had been thinking about the concept of vessels, and it applies to a lot of things I deal with on the album: Not feeling like a woman and not feeling like I was made to make babies; not feeling like a vessel for my art and being projected onto; not feeling like being a performer comes naturally to me. All this relates to how my body is here to support me or hinder me. The other part of it is that this song is partly about being in a band and making music with other people. A lot of this record is about making music.