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.

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.

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.

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

For a really long time, I've been trying to find balance where I can talk about my feelings and be upfront with people, confront issues and not have to beat them to death or ignore them.

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'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.