My relationship to Brooklyn is probably the relationship that any 40-year-old man has to his hometown, which is that this is where I live, this what I know, yet it's different, it's changed. My fascination with the city has maybe subsided and now it's just where I'm from, where I live.

If you are a good writer you use your life experience to do something different than someone who is 20-years-old can do. That is where you get your power. That is our power as a group. I am not trying to make the same music I made 10 years ago.

We're fighting internal struggles, I am the cancer for my own cure.

The only thing an artist is useful for, and the only reason why we don't just line 'em up against the wall and shoot them, is because, at their best, they're the reflection of our lives, that most regular people can't even afford to think about.

Maybe my great struggle, and it's probably not anything different from too many other people, but it certainly is what drives the music, is a hugely internal one.

I hope that people take away hope, maybe not in an obvious sense, but in the form of hearing somebody who's genuinely fighting to stay above water. And in that fight, there's hope. In that fight, maybe there's positivity.

Trying to separate myself from my instincts of pessimism and cut out and define what it is that I really do love, what I'm here to be, why I'm here, and what I think is worth being alive for and fighting for. And those things change, but I think that that's something I am always chasing.