I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.
My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.
I guess I just do being a man different than some.
I just don't care that much about the band name. I'm not so precious about it. The Harpoons were different people, but The Boy-Friends were and are the same people as The Visions. I changed it to The Visions when we made 'Transangelic Exodus' because I guess we didn't feel so friendly and boyish anymore.
God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.
My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.
I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground's records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.
I wrote 'My Teeth Hurt' in April 2018 when my teeth hurt and I didn't have dental insurance.
I think there's a large worry in queer communities about imitating straight people, when queerness has its own identity and maybe can be a radical force that should be dismantling stuff that locks people into structures.
You know, a lot of people have an instinct to downplay the fact that they are performing and be, like, 'There is no theatre here. This is just me playing the songs.' At some point I just realised how much better it could be if you weren't shy about being a performer.
We spent a lot of time making 'Transangelic Exodus' and toward the end of it, my ability and my love for music - that is, just garage music, direct and immediate - started to feel neglected.
I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.
My two most fervent interests are pop music and traditional Judaism. Hell of a pair of fervent interests.
I was pretty much into punk rock and that's all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.
In terms of keeping kosher, I've basically just been vegetarian. I want to be fully vegetarian anyway, though sometimes my mom makes chicken soup and I have to eat it. I just love it.
Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.
I don't really worship the album 'Transformer.' It's not the best thing that Lou Reed has done.
If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.
We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.
Being in a rock n' roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.
