Aaron Dessner

Professions :

Songwriter

Born :

April 23, 1976

We've always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we're not a band with big songs.

song trying

Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It's almost about the marriage of the band.

wife writing

"I'll Still Destroy You" song is lovingly talking about how we change our states of mind, whether it's weed or wine or whatever. It's an ingredient in my life. Sometimes we overindulge ourselves. I've always been okay with that in a funny way. I sing about that stuff a lot, and the dangers of it.

weed wine song

Everybody knows we're big liberals and I was a very outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, and I still am. It's impossible for us to separate the songs we're writing from what's going on in the world.

writing song world

There's political content in almost every song we've ever written on some level. It colors everything.

political song

In fact, after Donald Trump won, some of the relief of finishing record was to turn off all the politics for a while. There were some songs that had more of the political stuff that we just decided to wait on and put aside. A few weeks after the election, I stopped watching cable news and just unplugged. My way of dealing with the new situation we're in was to just work on something that I care about.

political waiting song

The Planned Parenthood 7" project is an example of us putting our noses to the grindstone on and trying to make a little difference. Working on that was my way of handling my own emotions about Donald Trump. I was talking about politics for so long, I just kind of ran out of juice on that.

emotion trying long

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