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.

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it's that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records, I don't hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal. I'd like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack. I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.

I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don't have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could. Around that same time I started running. I never saw myself as the kind of person who would become a runner. It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever run three miles, let alone 26.2.

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.

More times than not, it's a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.