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.

You can either go to the gym because you want to lose weight, or you can go to the gym because you like how it makes you feel when you're running.

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?"

I'm not a horror movie guy, but I think the guy that did Saw, or maybe House or something, he was saying you love that age as a storyteller because a nineteen-year-old is still dumb enough to make really bad decisions, but he's allowed to be out on his own.

Just looking into something kind of analytically can give a lot of ideas.

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.

One of the coolest things to me about going to a show is you look over, and the guy next to you is sitting there drinking a beer and he's wearing a Donkeys t-shirt. And you're like, "Dude, I love The Donkeys."