If you wait four or five years between records, it better be a masterpiece, you know? And if you keep putting them out, you're saying, 'Hey, here's 10 more songs'.

The reality is that the shows kind of disconnect from the songs a little bit. You're playing the songs, but they take on a life of their own.

Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head.

Words and music together create powerful, powerful things.

I am a really obsessive music listener, and I would look for clues.

It's really easy, in a band, to overstate - you feel like everything you do is different than the past. I think this is just another Hold Steady record, but at the same time, there is some evolution. Like, "How can we make this chorus bigger?" "What do we want this to sound like?"

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.