Never let your fear decide your fate.

Look, one of the things that I know for sure is that none of us truly knows. That's it. It'll hit you later.

I like to write pop songs and the stuff I write is fairly poppy, so I thought maybe my lot in life was to write pop songs for people. It never felt right writing songs for other people to sing, though.

If you're waiting around for something to be handed to you or win the lottery, chances are nothing is ever going to go down, you know, so you got to make it happen on your own.

In fact, on a side note, after the success of the first record, I got asked to write for some pop artists, as everybody does, and I did a couple songs for some of these massive stars and the review that I got back was, "This artist likes the song but it's too POP-y for them." I was like, "What do you mean, I thought I was writing for a pop star."

Growing up from Nirvana to all the bands I was listening to at the teenage time, those were my best friends, more than my real friends. Those were the people that sang me to sleep or gave me the confidence I needed to go to first period. When we're all so insecure with weird stuff, when we're having weird feelings toward girls or guys, or whatever. It's the insecurity of life that we all go through. So music helped me.

Videos are tricky because stuff sounds amazing on paper and it seems like it's going to be this mystical experience and you're going to look back and go, "Wow, that was magic." But more times than not, it doesn't end up that way, so I never know what I'm going to get.