A conversation with you is a different thing than projecting to a couple hundred people. It's bigger and more animated and it's on a bigger scope, but still in the heart, it's honestly me.

I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it.

One of the things is my process requires a lot of repetition. I can probably drive people crazy because I'm interested in playing a song twenty times in a row.

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.

One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

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.

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.