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.

My wife is very happy about me keeping all my music in my pocket.

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.

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.

When we started the band, I was really like, "We just want to make a lot of records" - not quite unlike Guided By Voices' schedule. I've always thought that our live thing is what we do best, and having a really robust, big catalog makes for the most interesting live band - especially with people, at this point, traveling to see us night after night. For us to have almost 100 songs to pull from is a really cool thing. The sets can be different. They can be invigorating on an intellectual level. I definitely hope to continue to release records at an accelerated pace.

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.

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America / Have such a sad time together.