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

You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

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.

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.

Some people will totally get restless, since you can make demos pretty easy. It's not unreasonable for someone to say, "All right, can you just record this and go home and work on it?"

Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.

I think the other thing that shaped me a little bit is that I really didn't have any success in music until my early to mid-30s.