avacuousmind

Hey kevin, I tried to ask this question a while ago during your Q&A on an (australian?) stream, but I was not Australian and without priority) so here goes:

Start to finish, what is your writing process like? Does the tune or the lyric come first, generally? Since you regularly posted lyrics in Facebook notes for awhile, I was convinced that your music came after the prose collected over a length of time. Is that not so?

I also noticed some of your material comes in small part by what you read, as you used to post your books on Instagram. American Pastoral comes to mind for "Awake in the dirt". Any other instances of that happening in your songs?

And since I have you here, I once pulled you aside after a show at the Hardrock Cafe in Arizona a couple years back. I asked you how you can go up infront of everyone and sing about the stuff you do without so much as a choke-up, as far as emotions go. I asked this because I was going to propose to my then-girlfriend with a song I wrote, but I'm generally incapable of keeping emotionally contained. The advice you gave me was more or less "Just do it!" It was pathetically simple, but I just needed to hear it from you, I guess.

Our first dance as a single being was "You are the daybreak", and you even played it at a show so we could have another dance in the crowd. I was subject to overwhelming emotions through the whole set.

I want you to know that I appreciate the effort you put into being who you are, and I'm glad my wife and I got to meet someone like you. She says hi :) See you in AZ.

Edit: as far as my proposal went, your great advice didn't do shit. I was choking up through the whole thing. But she said yes, so I think I did alright!