sM | This is your third concept album, but it seems that storytelling has always been a big part of your music. How has your approach to crafting narratives changed over the years?

AS ── When I started writing narrative songs, it was vast, unexplored territory for me. I would choose a scenario and try to write something about it. In some ways, you find the things that work for you and the things that don't, so it sort of gets easier, but the more subject matter you've covered, the less you can do. You don't want to retread.

Early on, I had songs like “Hometown Hero” and “God Bless The Peaceful Man,” where I would take a character and throw them into an intense situation. It was fun to do, and I felt maybe like an old country and western songwriter writing about the Wild West or something. But at a certain point, I realized I couldn't keep up with this sort of shock-value songwriting. So I took the stories to a place I was more familiar with. In The Party, that was a period in my life where I was going to a lot of parties, so I took characters and wrote them into my familiar life. Then with The Skyline, I did the same thing─only it wasn't a party, it was a bar.

When I started writing the songs for Norm, they were unrelated. I wanted to make Norm like a normal record, a collection of songs. What ended up happening was that I looked at the batch of songs I had, and found a way I could turn all the details towards relating to each other. I decided that to further my writing, I had to take this to a place I wasn't familiar with and that was disconnected from my actual life.