The idea that things used to be better is fantasy. It's putting a halo on something that no one can disprove.

With all of the people in the world and all of the suffering and all of the things that people are forced to do for lack of other alternative, the fact that I had a subsidized education and got to go right into a life of playing music for a living, what a stupidly fortunate place to be.

Sometimes I just don't have time to wait for the muse to come, so I've developed things to force the muse to come back.

I remember somebody saying, "I feel really bad for kids growing up around iPads right now. It's just too complicated. Life's too complicated." I think, yeah, but I remember being a kid and holding up a new piece of technology that was made in the '80s and my grandparents going, "Oh, it's too complicated." It didn't seem complicated to me.

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.

I'm influenced in a million different ways by a million songs that I've heard and digested.

I was an English major in university and that got me into novels, but I read a lot of books as a kid.