Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around. Ten years ago, our reality was spending a lot more time in obscurity before anyone really knew who we were. I don't feel like I have any real advice to give anybody who is starting a band today. As Mike Watt said, "You know, not everyone has the ability to be born at the same time." We wanted to be like R.E.M., but the reality is that 15 years after R.E.M. was putting out those records, the playing field had changed drastically as well.

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.

Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It’s a language aside from the language they have with strangers. I’ve always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I’ve always loved it and I like how those words sound together.

Every record we do there are always two camps. There's the camp that's like, "I love it. It sounds different than the last one." There are the people that are like, "I want it to sound like the last one." You can't please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.

I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.