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.

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 remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language.

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.

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.

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.

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