The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

So my one kid's 4, my other kid's 4 months, I'm 44, Barack Obama is the 44th president - it's all lining up nicely here.

I think a lot of things are written from experience, but then you become a writer and talk about other people's experience and you tell stories. I mean, you can't just tell your own story all the time.

I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.

One thing you might suggest to a young band is don't get involved in any kind of long-term contract because everything changes on a bimonthly basis: The way people hear music and access it, the way it is distributed.

I'd like people to be educated on the voting machines, making sure that our democracy isn't being hijacked by computer technology. There's no reason there can't be a paper trail on those machines.