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 love that, for Kanye [West], there's no difference between the epic and the personal. That makes him sound like a really grandiose douche - which, I don't think anyone, himself included, could contest - but at the same time, it's really amazing. I love the scope of his perfectionism.

You have to figure out as a band how a band becomes a business, and then you have to keep that business mentality separate from the creative one, which is good for the songs. It's always a work in progress.

Sometimes you get really bitter about how the prettiest images don't typically end up attached to the most interesting music. But I just take that as a challenge to try to do something cool.

I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.

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.

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.