I guess everyone has their own definition of what folk is or pop or whatever. I find it incredibly hard to describe music these days.

People digest and process music differently, and I'm sure that was the case even when I was a kid.

It's really hard to maintain a band as a democracy. Again, I think there's been a shift. There's a lot of emphasis put on style and a singular personality, as opposed to a more anonymous group of people playing music. It's more about can I dress this person up? Are they going to look pretty? I feel like the cult of personality is back, for sure.

I feel like a lot of the stuff coming out right now just feels really inauthentic to me. But apparently, people don't seem to see through it. And this makes me sound bitter, but it's just my perspective. I'm not bitter. I just feel like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of any sort of integrity. It just doesn't feel like it's coming from the heart, basically. It just feels like it's being produced because people know it's a formula that will work, or it's easily digestible and fun to look at.

It is definitely much easier to feel that an album is disposable - to dismiss an album or delete the tracks you don't like or to just throw it into shuffle or whatever.

I do enjoy talking about how everything's changed and I'm fascinated by it, and I can spend my time worrying, like, "Are we going to appeal to teens?" But then, if I were to try to make a record for teens, I'd be doing exactly what I said I didn't want to do. That'd be posturing. And I'm watching other people trying to do that, and they all look stupid. But for some of them, it's working, so cash in.

Every album has a thing where it's like, "How are we going to marry our four ideas and personalities?" The older we get, the more people become comfortable with their strengths and weaknesses. Being in a band with such a long history can be frustrating and slow, but ultimately it's so much more rewarding.