King Tuff

“My friends ask me what it's like moving from Vermont to L.A., but no matter where I am, I pretty much just end up sitting in coffee shops, thinking about songs.”

“I listen to top 40, old country, blues... I'm really into Roger Miller.”

“I knew there was something about 'Sun Medallion,' in particular, because I just had to record it the second I wrote it.”

“I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.”

“I'm not a huge practicer, which is probably not a good thing because my band definitely needs to practice.”

“I have a 15-passenger van, which is not fun to drive in L.A. ever.”

“My best moments are when I write songs out of nowhere.”

“It involved a lot of trust, but I love Bobby Harlow, and I loved the albums that he made.”

“I always tell people there's some kind of wall that you have to break through to see the beauty of L.A. The first few times I came here, I was like, 'I don't know about this place.' Then one day, it just totally flipped for me. It was crazy.”

“I saw Frances Bean at a Blink 182 show. And she was with a guy who looked just like Kurt Cobain.”

“That's always my downfall on tour: the food. I just want to eat everything.”

“I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.”

“I don't like science because I don't think it makes sense to put a definition on everything. It's a lot more exciting to think of things as mysterious.”

“I love collaborating with people, but I also really love working by myself.”

“Every record has been very different, so I can't really compare them. The first record was good. I originally recorded about half the songs on that one in 2003 or something, and then I went back a few years later and re-recorded them and added some other songs.”

“The very first music I recorded by myself, when I was 17, I said it was by King Tuff.”

“I think the key to great art and great artists is to just fully be yourself and not be scared of that, and be the extremes of your personality. Show the extremes of your personality and embrace the imperfections. Embrace the things about yourself that you might not like.”

“It's hard to talk about it without sounding like a hippie. But trees are really inspiring to me. They're like the masters of the earth.”

“I think the first person who kind of broke my mind was probably Jimi Hendrix. Listening to him opened my mind up to where you can take music and how far you can take rock n' roll.”

“I loved living with my parents - that's probably why I did it for so long. But it was almost too easy to live there. I had to force myself to get out, had to challenge myself. I had to start a new chapter.”