Q: When you're writing music (vocal harmonies in particular) do you have the structure mapped out in your head (or on paper) ahead of time before you go about recording each component? Or do you record one track and improvise the harmony over the playback?
A: doing vocal harmonies to the extent that i do them now is a new thing for me, and i mainly learned it from doing vines every day. but on long songs it's different, because there's so much more territory to cover, and the tendency is to be lazy (because there are so many more miles of song to cover!) -- so here's a new trick i use that allows me to use more harmonies throughout the song without becoming exhaused-- i build it from the lead, and i just pitch shift it all over the place! that's how i write it. so this would be during the recording process, once i have a vocal (or actually the temp vocal) i just make it from the computer -- this encourages me to try crazy things. one of the first times i did this was on "free to do whatever you want to" -- for example, there is one near the end of the bridge (i think on "can't get over my fear") ... i never would have thought to do that if i was like, ready to record, quick what should i sing .  if i'm sitting around and i can just pitch the lead anywhere, i am free to try really crazy stuff. and in the end, whatever i pick is not that hard to sing. so then i just learn it and sing it, and delete the fake one. and now it sounds just as cool, but it's real! so basically, writing it from the computer lets me try out things really quickly, and be really ambitious. then once i get the part, i just learn it and deliver it. On vines, this really doesn't apply, or also on those dense all-chord jingles in history of japan. Those are all being written note for note when i first write it. and it's become a very sensitive thing. a jingle like "it's time for world war 1" i will be sitting at the keyboard meticulously trying different things until the chords are exactly right. And then when i record it, it's pretty simple -- you just sing all the notes of the chords, (taking various other basic considerations). doing vines 7 days a week really accelerated my vocal harmony game, and i'm looking forward to doing much much more of it in the future