I'm over smoking. You know, I feel like I've gone on long hikes and gotten to the top of the mountain and I'm looking at something beautiful, some great huge landscape, and there's some of the cleanest air that's on the planet. And then I light up, and say, "Ahh, what a great smoking moment this is!" So it's something evil that's taken over, and I want control over it.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

The one thing about going from the audience to the stage in just three years is that you know how it feels to be down there.

I used to kind of blame someone for not being able to get through that - I'm talking about the addiction part - but I've had a few experiences recently where you don't blame the person anymore.

I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.

This little four-string songwriting tool started changing the way I brought songs to the group.

These pop songs almost feel like tabloid journalism, in a way. It's c**p that people seem to like. And I don't know if it has meaning. I don't know if one of the pop songs of the summer has any fibre in it. People are consuming it, and is it healthy?... Maybe there's some healthy property or some restorative property that I'm not receiving. It seems like it has a really high fructose content.