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.

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.

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.

They say what doesn't kill the soul will make you stronger, but you can't be a stone-hearted man.

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 deal with everything in my life in music - everything that ever happens to me just finds its way into a song or onto a record. I need it. It's like my life jacket. If I didn't have that way of processing those feelings, I'd probably be a murderer.

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.