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 don't really pursue writing songs for other people. I guess one of the things I always think about is a good line in a song should be something I can hear myself saying.

My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.

I made a decision at some point to live a nontraditional life. I've become like, the opposite of a consumer. I just want freedom. I don't want stuff. I don't want clutter. I just want to be able to move freely. I want to be good to the people I love. But I don't want stuff. I just want, you know, love and big ideas.

Before I had a driver's license, and I lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis and went to high school and came home - I could ride my bike around or get a ride from my parents, but my world was pretty small, limited. Like anyone at that age, I only knew things I could get to.

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.

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