Some people I've talked to have had really an interpretation of this record as being nostalgic. But in some ways, when we were writing Stay Positive, I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully.

Before I had a driver's license, and I lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis and went to high school and came home - I could ride my bike around or get a ride from my parents, but my world was pretty small, limited. Like anyone at that age, I only knew things I could get to.

There's a lot of ways to be honest that don't necessarily involve absolute facts being true. I think that's something I absolutely try to do.

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.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs.

I guess the drinking and the drugs are interesting to me because the way we use them and our society uses them, we kind of manufacture highs and lows.