When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record. I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like. I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla's bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play."

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.

There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I'd always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, "I will never live in fear again."

I just rediscovered my guitar.

Between every record, we all split off in our own world and we all end up listening to usually pretty different music on our own. We come together not really knowing what the other people having been really listening to and what's been influencing them.

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

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.