As far as keeping my sanity, it's something I've only recently tried to focus on as a means of self-preservation.

When you write a song you're more or less saying, "This is everyone. I think this is everyone." It doesn't necessarily have to be this thing where I go out and I'm like candy-striping, or becoming a therapist or something. I think that maybe, maybe I'm supposed to [be a musician], because of that fact.

It does feel really good to sing songs about somebody that I really respect, admire, love, care about and am so passionately attracted to after all this time.

For me, making music in general is a therapeutic process. It began as a way for me to meet friends, and when you're a kid just screaming your face off, you're processing anger; you're processing all the things that happened to you, whether it's mistrust or confusion, whether you've gone through abuse.

My mother, father and brothers (I was the youngest of three boys), were all very sarcastic and we were a complete Irish-Catholic family. We didn't talk about our feelings ever, and if we did, we were yelling about them - there was no in-between. That's just carried over so many ways in my life and sabotaged relationships, sabotaged creative stuff.

I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.

I hated old people as a young kid who thought he knew anything about punk rock. I just thought old people sucked and I thought their opinions sucked.