There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

I can remember how I sang - a little more nasal-y back then. Listening to those old recordings is like seeing a photograph of yourself from 10 years ago. You're wearing what you thought looked cool at the time. You had your hair styled the particular way you thought looked cool. It's an accurate depiction of who you were and what you looked and sounded like at that point in your life. It doesn't necessarily mean that it aged in a way that it feels as cool or sounds as good to you, or says what you thought it said, 10 years later. That's just the nature of growing older.

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn't get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don't even want.

For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it. ...Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.

Nada Surf and Harvey Danger are good bands. I think they've just stayed true to why they play music in the first place, it's just because they love doing it and they love each other and that's the impetus for doing it, not trying to keep singles on the radio and on MTV.

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don't feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.