The battered idealist. It's just my favorite character ... To me, a hero is somebody who is able to accept the environment of the world, deal with the stuff that's thrown in their path ... and somehow keep their heart.

I always loved song writers who wrote songs in the first person, so it's kind of like that.

I wanted to follow the path of music and feel that power, and I couldn't turn back.

People dance and we have a lot of music and... this might be the closet I get for a while.

The current state of music journalism is not bad, but it's not great at all. Some of the hip-hop stuff people get into is exciting, because there's a passion and there's something to explain to a more mainstream audience, so you get these passionate writers who want to express their love for rap and hip-hop, which is cool. But there are too many magazines, and the access has been diminished, so the quality of profiles has gone way down. Internet stuff can be really good, though. I like the dialogue between fans on the Internet. I think that's the best rock writing that's going on right now.

Time puts things in proper perspective.

I always loved movies, but I never thought I would presume to be a screenwriter and definitely not a director. I spent a lot of time for no money trying to teach myself how to write a script. It always felt like everybody was looking the other way and sneaking that script through the system, but it did well later on video and got another chance.