Q: How did you write the songs for this album?

A: All the songs for Living Without Hope were originally written on an acoustic guitar and then given a full musical arrangement when recorded. I think of it as an album in which each song is built around a full guitar strum - it's as if, to use a painting metaphor, I were thinking in blocks of color rather than in fine or delicate lines. It was an interesting way of writing, one that felt deliberately raw and basic, and I hope that energy comes across in the final recording.

Q: Can you tell us more about the title of the album? It sounds rather depressing.

A: The title seems quite downbeat at first glance, but actually it's not. It was inspired by a number of lines about hope from the American author Henry Miller. In one essay, he writes: "Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions." On the album's back cover, I put the more succinct "A world without hope, but no despair" from his most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer. So you see, it's not negative - it's about seeing through the delusion that is hope and instead embracing reality as it exists. For me, that is the central theme of the album.

Q: What kinds of ideas or stories were you aiming to explore in your lyrics?

A: The first songs I wrote for the album tended, as you might expect, to focus on my immediate emotions, such as desire and seduction ("Anne Moore and More") or reflecting on a failed relationship ("Over and Over"). But the songs of which I am most proud are those where I stepped outside of myself and tried to explore ideas, characters, and stories that were not directly my own. "Give and Take" is my favorite example of that kind of songwriting. The pastiche of Bob Dylan was also fun.

Q: What exactly is "The Dylan Blues" about? The story told in the lyrics is kind of surreal.

A: When I first came up with the idea for that song, I wasn't focused on trying to sing or play like Bob Dylan. For me, the real challenge was to write lyrics that employ the same narrative strategies as Dylan. For instance, he has a habit of addressing the listener as "you," which sounds intimate until you realize that the "you" he's addressing isn't *actually* you. You're just an actor, a substitute, and it's your job to work out your place in the drama he's describing. Therein lies another Dylan strategy: to mention people and scenarios that we've never heard of while passing them off as part of our "shared" reality. Hence the line about the "Italian rented jacket that he borrowed from Louise" - as if we all simply know who Louise is! As for the meaning of the story, I would prefer listeners try to work that out for themselves. Obviously, it helps to be familiar with the song's two main cultural references in Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (particularly the Wife of Bath's tale).