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.

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.

You can think of a number of bands where the first record is by far their biggest record. And that must be hard for people to recapture. Hard for people to live with.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.

I graduated high school in 1989, and there was no alternative rock radio, and there wasn't really good college radio you could get on a car stereo. Once you get a car at that age, you're spending all the time you can away from home, sometimes just driving around aimlessly. Listening, or not even listening, but subconsciously soaking up this classic rock barrage.

I've tried to write songs for other people and it usually requires them singing it and then changing the phrasing. I can put a lot of words in a song, and one of the reasons is, I'm not that good of a singer, so I don't hold a lot of notes.

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.