Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me.

I'm not only a songwriter but I'm a massive music fan and I love going to shows. It's different than reading a book.

I'm able to draw outside my own personal experiences. No one wants to hear the song about what I really did today, which is go get coffee and clean my apartment.

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.

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.

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.

There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.