You'd have to be kind of a bonehead not to feel pressure.

When I was 10, I would hear songs like "I Love You Always Forever" by Donna Lewis on the radio, and I want to make stuff that a 10 year old might hear coming out of the radio and think, "Yeah! I love this!"

It's a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.

When you meet someone, a friend, who's living out on the road, or living semi-homeless, or leading their life in a radically different way, it makes you think about your own life in a really critical way and feel completely disoriented.

The only thing that deeply frustrates me is the slow speed [of major labels]. The more people involved, the slower the pace.

The music industry has completely restructured itself in the last couple of years because it hasn't been making money. Labels are signing bands they trust as artistic entities, instead of cash cows. They're signing bands because they believe that the bands have tastes beyond anything they could concoct themselves.

Everyone in our generation lives in a world where you're surrounded by all sorts of music all the time. People's tastes are made of combinations of genres.