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When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.

I am really heavy into songwriting.

My songwriting process is painful. Songwriting is brilliant. It's a load of fun - when it works. It's really difficult as well.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

'Gatekeeper' was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I haven't written many like that.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy. I wrote about everyday stuff.