You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

The idea of anyone collecting compact discs just seems bizarre to me.

When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.

It's a template record for the intersection between pop and noise, starting out with 'Sunday Morning' - a real beautiful, almost innocent sunny day song. You have a lot of different types of things on one record. It can be really pretty, or it can be really awful inside, depending on where your head's at at the moment. I got it in ninth grade and I think I've listened to it every month since then.

As a writer, if you have something on a page, you can start moving it around and get something you like. But if you have a blank page, it's just gonna be a blank page.

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

One thing I have a tendency to do is not write choruses, or write choruses that have different words. The first chorus will have different words than the second chorus.