To kill the misconception, I don’t think the songs we wrote before ‘Danger Days’ are bad songs by any means. In fact, I kinda think some of them are among my favorites we have ever written. A lot of them are kinda f—ing rad… they just so happened to have been created in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and we as their parents were not ready to raise them just yet… and so they sat and waited.

Every time somebody ever told you that you weren't gonna amount to anything, you know, that's your time to shine, you know? You can show everybody and prove to yourself what you're doing is real and that it counts and that it makes a difference.

I was feeling miserable physically, in a lot of pain to the point where it was almost crippling me, especially creatively. I decided to take that and use it as an inspiration for getting out of bed and making something again.

My first show was when I was a high school freshman, but it was at the junior class dance. My older friend and bandmate booked it.

I started thinking about how life is a lot like getting pushed out of a plane. You didn't ask to be here, none of us did. But we're all careening through space towards an eventual end that no one's gonna be able to put off. That's the only thing that's definite, this impact. So I started to think about how a lot of us fall at an incredible velocity, and it's over in the blink of an eye.

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

I would rather be trampled by thousands of children than touch a spider.