A lot of the bands I loved, I didn't know where they came from or where they were going.

I generally write music first and then hum out the vocal. Sometimes I'll take a phrase that I use as a placeholder and just write around that.

Everything I'm doing musically is for its own sake. I'm recording at my house, trying really hard to write songs with a four-track tape recorder.

I'm trying to play guitar every day. I think I have a gift, and I've not been nurturing it for a long time. So I'm trying to pick it back up.

It sounds a little cliché, but I wanted to capture some of the feelings or sounds that I heard when I listened to music that actually took me places.

I was part of punk's second generation, so, not the first wave of '70s punk, but the American hardcore scene. I had a really strong love for music prior to that, but punk created a new template.

I started wanting to inject more colorful chord phrasings from the music I actually grew up on, which was Hendrix, Rolling Stones, and stuff like that.