That's right, the grand prize for winning MTV's Rock the Cradle was a record deal. Are they going to be your band on the new album?

They may or may not be the same backing band for this next record. Some of them are more successful than I am, and I can't even afford them. Which is no bad-blood whatsoever, it's a huge pat on the back, I'm thrilled for them. But the core of the band, which is Jesse Siebenberg and I, the violinist Paul Cartwright and the keyboardist Dennis Hamm, are working on some stuff to turn into the label.

Tell me more about your current album We All Go Home.

We All Go Home is a collection of my earlier material. It's a few songs that were co-written with the band, in a writing session right before the first track of the album got recorded. The majority of it is original material that I've had for some time. Basically the whole concept for We All Go Home was... when we were making the record we were into a few different things, stylisticly, not one specific thing. We wanted to try and incorporate all those different things into what we were doing. It's sort of like the iPod being on shuffle, we never felt like we had to stick to any one thing all the time. So it shuffles around from rap to rock to funk to jazz, there are some R&B-ish moments, all under this singer-songwriter umbrella, and we tie it altogether with strong instrumentalists. I wanted to create a synergy that could carry on and expand into a live context. That was kind of the goal of the record.

We wanted to keep it all solo stuff really sparse, really simple from a production because it's about the songs more on the record. So some of the moments on the record are, the electric guitar solo at the end of “March On, America”, that's actually a violin solo.

Really? Cause that really does sound like electric guitar.

No, that's electric violin. That's one of the staples of our live show. And similarly there is a violin solo on “We All Go Home” that we expand when we're performing it live. There's some fun stuff. I think we succeeded.

Also the co-producer [Jesse Siebenberg] and I, both of our parents are famous, they had a lot of pop success, and we both had a little bit of a chip on our shoulder to create and produce some slick popish stuff. Even though we both hate pop and don't even listen to pop, I think, to a certain degree, we got that out of the way.