Jamie xx

My uncle, who gave me my first turntables when I was ten, also gave me records to mix, but I never understood house music. I thought it was boring until I was old enough to go to a club and feel it, the fact that it actually makes you just want to dance.

It doesn't make sense for me to try to be, like, a dance dude who only releases two 12-inches a year and then plays every weekend. Making an album, you get to put out a body of work that shows a lot of different sides of you. And you get to work on it for an intense period of time and promote that album. And then you get to move on.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.