Why are you performing without a microphone at the ICA?
It’s a small space. I won’t need a microphone. Music is better without amplification.

Are there any songs of yours that you wouldn’t want to see set to dance?
No. The style of dance that I’m working with is not anything that would be destructive to the music, ’cause it’s not intertwining with the music particularly. It’s not the same as making a music video, which always tears apart the song and puts it back together in some background music kind of way.

How many instruments would you say that you own?
I can’t really answer that because so many of them are percussion instruments, and percussion instruments combine to form larger instruments, so you can’t easily say where one ends and the next begins. Outside of percussion instruments, probably 100. That’s my hobby.

You worked As a copy editor at Spin and Time Out New York. Is it safe to say your songs don’t have many grammatical errors?
Oh no, I have plenty of grammatical errors in my songs, and I wholeheartedly endorse grammatical errors in popular music. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” would be very hard to translate into correct English without ruining the song. If you can’t use what would otherwise be substandard language for repetition, then the musicality of the text falls apart.

In your 2010 documentary and in your music, you seem fairly introverted. Do you enjoy performing live?
Sometimes performing live can be a hoot if I’m getting to do something that I don’t ordinarily do. What I don’t like doing really is touring, where I have to do the same performance again and again in different cities and I never get to go home. It’s a low level of torture. Sleep deprivation is considered part of torture, and sleep deprivation is definitely part of the touring package.