Here's an awesome tour story: I was playing these two shows last fall in Europe, we played at Reykjavík, and the three or four days we were in Reykjavík happened to be the one and only Sugarcubes reunion show… So it was like, tour of a lifetime.

I certainly owe a lot of awesomeness to blogs, to people who have been blogging about a show, or blogging about a single, or blogging about something. It's just amazing to me that it seems to be a nice equalizer. People don't necessarily need the clout of a big "record company machine" to put their face on a billboard. It seems more organic and honest in a lot of ways, for fans of music to be critics I suppose.

Some songs I wrote that night, and some songs took nine months to arrange, get how I positioned them. Some songs I wrote parts of when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen… Just putting it together, just finding the right place for it. So it's really been a long time coming. ... I'm actually really restless, in the sense that I'd rather be always making something new. I'm really excited about making a second record. I've got a lot of things up my sleeve, I guess.

I enjoyed, and I tried to soak up and learn everything as fast as I could from doing any kind of music. It's good to have a gig. If you're a musician, it's good to be working. I love doing all of it, but Marry Me is my baby, St. Vincent is my child.

I was recording with The Polyphonic Spree, recording The Fragile Army, and we were holed up in January in Minnesota at our studio. They called Mike in to play, and we just hit it off, in a really, really special way. Actually, the night after meeting and having a conversation with him, I sat down and I wrote "All My Stars Aligned". And I just kind of had an idea, "Wouldn't it be amazing if Mike Garson played? So the guy who played solo in Aladdin Sane, wouldn't it be amazing if this guy played this song?" And I wrote it, based on a conversation we had, but I didn't want to ask him, because I felt shy, and nervous, and everything. It was a few months later, actually, we kind of got in touch, and, 'Oh, what are you doing?', and I sent him a couple songs that I was working on. I sent him "Your Lips Are Red" and I sent him "All My Stars Aligned", just to show, you know, 'wink-wink, hint-hint, this is what I'm doing.' And he wrote me back, the things that we'd said, and asked to play on the record. So I was, 'Well, okay, if you insist…' That worked out pretty miraculously.

The first thing I did when I picked up any instrument, when I was five years old, was write a song. It's kind of funny; I thought about it, statements that it's a "solo effort" — it's kind of like, "Oh, well I've been doing this since I was five." I was kind of doing this before I did anything else.

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