I'm a war of head versus heart, it's always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.

The late '90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio. We had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn't get arrested a year later. I had this feeling at the time that that was not possible anymore, so the idea of becoming the biggest band in the country—it seemed laughable. I felt that having those sort of ambitions was foolish, because there was no way that was going to be possible. If you saw it that way, you were just deluding yourself.

To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.

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.

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 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.

There were two recording studios in Bellingham. One was really expensive, a "nice studio." We were at the point where we were young and irreverent. We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. "Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that's really fancy. Well we've got an eight-track. We've got it going on here." Now that we have the resources, we're like, "Oh wow, a nice studio is pretty nice! They do have nice outboards here. It's actually a pretty good place." It's funny how much changes so quickly.