"The other day I was looking through some old sketchbooks of mine and I found something about the myth of Undine. She was a water goddess or water nymph and she was supposed to make people feel like there was no danger in the world and lull them into a sense of security. And she causes people to walk into the water. I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the last couple months. Undine will probably pop up somewhere [on the new album]. I do like stories from ancient times and the beginning of literature — the way they use personification. A character was not only a being but representative of a passion like adultery. Each character had an aspect of human nature that they represented. I found that a useful tool."

"I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night. I feel like it must be universal. Everybody must know that somewhere."