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

In the end, when you're writing a really good song, it strikes the right tone.

You can't get every girl; you get the ones you love the best.

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 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.

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?"

At forty-one, now I think it would be really cool to have an A&R guy say, "You know what? I don't think you've got this album sequenced right."