My kids don't really like when I sing for some reason...but they like when I play guitar. So I started writing songs just playing guitar for them.

As I got older, it turned into hardcore punk. I started getting into more aggressive music.

Punk came along and grunge made guitar solos uncool.

You can go to any small town in America, there's going to be a metal fan there. You can't say that about post-rock.

In my entire life I never set out to do anything ground-breaking or pioneering, and I'm not going to start anytime soon.

There are five of us. We've all played in various bands together, in different combinations. I know that Todd [Cook] and Tony [Bailey] are my favorite rhythm section - they're just like a unit. I guess we've all just played together in various capacities, so when the band was coming together, it was sort of like we just chose members because they had similar sensibilities and also because they're just cool. We all got along real well.

We were pretty normal - suburban kids having a good time playing in bands. We were silly. We weren't dark, intense, humorless people. Humor was one of the connecting forces among us. It was more like camaraderie.