When you have a young kid you can't go out much at night, so I spent a lot of time at home, watching movies and cooking dinner with my wife. It felt like what most people experience. White picket fence stuff.So there was some enjoyment of that normalcy, but I have to admit that part of me missed the chaos of touring. I think it's about balance.

More than anything, being an English major made me more appreciative of authors and what an incredible feat it is to just finish a novel, let alone a really brilliant one.

If I write about something that I've experienced and somebody goes, "Oh my God, I feel the exact same way," then both of us are connected, and when you feel connected to people, you feel understood. You feel a sense of purpose.

You feel the weight of the world and you take things in and you are acting out from a place of being pushed and visceral. It's heavy. You can't be there all of the time.

I think it's important to accept all the ways that we're absurdly lucky. I'm a white male from a safe city in a wealthy country.

To say, "It used to be better," nobody can say, "Well, no it wasn't." It's like telling a story that is self-aggrandizing about someone who has passed away, when they can't tell the other side of the story.

There's when a phrase circles in my head in a number of ways for any number of days, weeks, or months, and then that eventually becomes a song. There's a slow permeation of the idea and then that leads into a bunch of themes and becomes a bunch of lines.