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.

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'm still learning, but I can see there are decisions in life that are going to be very challenging and it's always better to get through them, always.

I'm three years into my recovery from heroin and all this stuff and I want to be able to help people. But they have to do it on their own.

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.

If you start getting yourself into just doing stuff for the money, even if it's a desperate situation, I just firmly believe that if you stick it out through that, then something right will come down the path.

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