The idea of anyone collecting compact discs just seems bizarre to me.

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.

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

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 reality is that the shows kind of disconnect from the songs a little bit. You're playing the songs, but they take on a life of their own.

Some people I've talked to have had really an interpretation of this record as being nostalgic. But in some ways, when we were writing Stay Positive, I was really obsessed with age. I kept saying it was a record about trying to age gracefully. This record, I think actually was us aging gracefully.