"You have to sit with the songs until they start to live. Or do things straight-up spontaneously. I set up a beat just like I do in the live show, add the lyrics that I wrote in thirty minutes - I already had a topic in mind because I had this crazy experience with this girl who was trying to get close to me and it freaked me out because she was really close to another friend of mine, and I thought, "This is a story, I'm gonna make this into a song.""

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I was in the hospital and I was paralyzed and I went through all of these things. I've had all of these crazy experiences and jobs in my life, but I never really write about them because I've already told them as stories to friends. For me, the process of writing is the process of invention. But the hospital story felt told already. There was nothing to discover in the telling of it. The discovery had to be in the form. It wasn't really the unfamiliarity of the form, it was more about a way incorporate invention and how to realize it imaginatively.

— Steve Toltz