Quotes from Borns

I had a band when I was in middle school, but I was the drummer. I kind of thought if I was going to be in a band, I'd be the drummer. I'm innately drawn to rhythm. But we didn't have any shows. We just jammed in our parents' basement.

I really like Colin Blunstone, the lead singer of the Zombies.

My music diet growing up was lots of sugar. Lots of retro-pop sugar. Motown, disco. A lot of English rock, like the Turtles, the Zombies, Bowie and stuff like that.

As far as playing instruments, it just feels good to have it under your hands. Cause sometimes those instruments have minor imperfections. Sometimes because they're so old, they're always out of tune a little bit.

To make a genuine record, it takes more than a cool beat and some auto tune.

We're always trying to make advancements in the arts and technology, so it's somewhat inevitable that we're going to make holograms of people.

I bought a Three Dog Night album when I was pretty young, and I remember listening to all those songs. That's just greatly crafted songwriting, and the songs have such great harmonies. I remember marveling over those and trying to figure them out on piano. That was my early education - figuring out records, older records, as a kid.

Songwriting itself, I don't think you can really teach that.

I do like how the music can be misunderstood.

I look at performance clothes as setting the mood for the whole show.

My mom's really into astrology and she's always telling me about the moon cycles and stuff like that.

I feel very short-attention span for like accomplishment. It's like 'oh that felt really good' and then it's kind of like an immediate emptiness of I need to make something else - I don't like to dwell on things too long.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

The music scene in Michigan is really folky and bluegrass, but my parents played a lot of disco. They really liked to dance.

A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what's going to happen next.

When I was growing up, there were a few musicians who would have regular gigs at restaurants, and I always thought it was so cool and unexpected how they would spontaneously perform. Being the ambitious kid that I was, I got into it and really studied it. I was so inspired by it.

There's beautiful things about tour - you're seeing the world, spreading music and I'm able to call that what I do. But it's about living lightly and abandoning things.

My folks bought a baby grand piano and that's where I did the majority of figuring out the songs I heard on the stereo.

I guess that's always the mystery of music. It's like why does this song make me feel so grey or why does it make me feel sad or happy or nostalgic and so I'm most fascinated by breaking that down in my music.

That's the worst and best thing about being in the studio, feeling completely lost and not knowing how to put the final touch on something. But once you find it, there's nothing like that feeling.

I just like the obstacle course of figuring out something.

I like to put coconut oil in my hair if it's looking dry. It's so unruly. It has a mind of its own.

Half the time, when I first run onstage, I can't look directly at the audience just because of self-consciousness. It's human nature. Sometimes you feel like the man, and sometimes you don't. But sometimes that self-conscious energy is good for the show, it draws people in more.

There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.