JG: We were talking about being ambitious on this record before, and I thought it was really sweet that—I didn't know this just before we went to air—and I told you that my favorite song right now is "I Will Be Found." And I said you wrote it on the piano? And you said yes. And that’s the first song you've ever written on the piano.
See, I wanted to play that, because that feels a bit like a McCartney song and it's really—
JM: I am not at liberty to agree with you.
JG: Why?
JM: I can't say “yes, that’s good ears. I was thinking more Lennon-esque."
JG: Your first song on the piano you've written. So was that scary?
JM:It was scary once I learned that this is a good enough song to finish and record. I've always played the piano since I was a kid, but I have my own untaught—not even self-taught—just untaught sort of approach to it. And you know, musicians have always said, you pick up another instrument you don't know and it sort of pulls other ideas out of you. So I'm really only capable of playing the key of C. But there was some other different sort of—there's some real poly-chordal stuff there where, like, I don't think if I knew how to play the piano I would ever put a D under a B-flat.
Like, you just wouldn't because you never learned to do it. So there's these fun little moments where I go, “oh, that's nice sounding," they're almost dissonant. And then I started singing over it. As soon as I sang, "I'm a little lost at sea / I'm a little birdie in a big old tree / ain't nobody looking for me here out on the highway," I went "oh no." And the "oh no" of it is, like, I now have this one moment to have to live up to in the rest of the song because it's too good an idea. And it's always when it's like a B-sectiony sort of thing, it just screws you.