Words and music together create powerful, powerful things.

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.

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.

So maybe it’s just a part of who we all are, and always were. My worry now, though, is that we are starting to nurture these neuroses of ours, and treating them like pets. That can’t be a good thing.

Ray Cappo never tried to convert me into a Krishna, although one of his cohorts probably did. I think it was just about being wrapped up in this thing. Hardcore, at one point, meant everything to me. Now you look back, and I still think it's cool, but to some extent I grew out of it. Other things became a bigger priority for me.

People make maps of all the places I've mentioned. I knew that those people were out there. I wanted to create something for them.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.