How does high art, like Rilke, relate to pop music?
You know, I think that pop is considered to be very lowbrow. And I really love Andy Warhol and what he did to make pop culture figures iconic, and how he took commercial art and made it fine. He made fine art out of, I don’t know, commercial … the concept of commercial work. And that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s pop music, but it’s art. It’s pop art music. It’s interesting because on one hand, it’s really accessible music. The vocab is very accessible, but then you have this kind of classic outlandish style that people can just rock in a mall in Minnesota. Also, the lyrics are pretty drifted. Like if you listen to “Paparazzi,” the song seems to be about one thing. But then you really dive into the lyrics, and it’s about a lot more. You wrote a new song on Britney Spears’ album and have written for the Pussycat Dolls, right? Yeah it’s true. So do you get high? [Laughs] Do I have to get high writing them? How do you channel the place where you know you are writing super-seductive lyri
