It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.

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.

The critics and hardcore music fans, those are the people you have to get to first, so we're really happy about it.

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.

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.

My big thing is to get onstage sober. Whatever happens from there happens. But you get onstage drunk and it's not going to be good. It takes a while. I have to sing a lot, so I can only drink so much. So most nights it's fine; even if I drink as much as I possibly can, I can't get that drunk.

If we enjoy what we're doing, we shouldn't really need a break.