The only word for love is everybody's name.

Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness. And I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness.

Hegemony is not defined by rivers or conventional borders - it's dominance, it's influence. So we get to decide in our hearts, are we in Iraq to help restore something, or are we there to establish dominance? How can you torture people and say, well, that's just a few bad apples in our culture?

When people in government [make mistakes], they don't say, those people in the government. They say, we've got a problem to solve.

Mortal City was really influenced by geography. [The song] "The Ocean" is the Pacific Northwest. Southern California and New York also figure into songs, and Iowa. "February" is very much about New England. "Mortal City" is Philadelphia. The whole album is this anthropomorphized landscape where the metaphors live in this geography.

[Mortal City ] was also the beginning of the reality of the fact that I was going to have little pieces of my personality identifying with all of these different parts of the country.

But if you're looking to be spooked by really tall trees then you've got to go to Washington State.