Q: how did you get the original inspiration for "got to know what's going on"? (love that song by the way)
A: i think we all just want to understand how the world really works, and what is really going on, and what everything is and means. i came up with the first line of the chorus, and many others, many years before i would have had the courage to take care of the entire songwriting, especially because dealing with a song where you only know the chorus, and then figuring out what comes before, is a very weird puzzle that i didn't learn how to do until years later. in fact i didn't even really have the courage to finish the chorus either, until years later. it was quite common for me to come up with quite normal sounding hooks and not know what to do with them, and back then (around 2010) my only strategy was to start at the beginning and go bonkers, from beginning to end. but there were many chorus-sounding figures that were generated at that time, such as 'i'm sad', 'i wanna go home', etc, which i didn't really know how to deal with. As of june 2017, recording songs regularly, my selection process was brute force random-number selection -- no pre-selection, no semi-finals, just get a randomly generated number out of 400 (or however many items there were in the list at the time) and you absolutely have to pick that one, no matter what it is. So that one came up and was still just a 1 line figure. so that's when the rest of it was written