It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.

Clearly, things are definitely changing in big ways as far as the way we consume music, listen to music, and what we expect from music.

The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it's easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have.

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.

I'm super interested in visual, and I love that being in a band can be as much about making an image as it is about making a sound.

I think certain people would be moved to be nostalgic about America's glory days, when the music set the tone for the cultural conversation and popular musicians had this absurd level of authority.