You're always trying to find new stuff and new inspiration. If you don't really push and you don't try something that feels exciting, then it's not worth doing.

I write songs now I look at my strengths and I start there. In The Walkmen, we'd start with the live stuff.

I felt like I could get away with calling it Black Hours. That could easily be the most depressing record ever written, but because there is this sense of fun throughout the whole thing I felt like I could get away with it. Like "5 A.M."; that song's in a minor key and I'm just wailing away and it could have been just wallowing depression, but it's not.

You feel like half of your life is a vacation when you go to these Barcelona music festivals and have all day to sound check or go to the pool.

Traveling makes a vacation lose all appeal. You would never want to take the family to a European city. You travel a lot, but it's a job.

The first ones I played were in New York at Joe's Pub; I played four shows, but I did something like 30 interviews and a couple radio shows in the mornings and completely blew out my voice. It kind of sucked.

The funny thing is that the studio that we recorded in was the same studio that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole used to warm up their voices in before they went across the street to CBS Radio. The owner has preserved it exactly the way it was in 1925. It was such a perfect coincidence that we were doing music inspired by that stuff in that room. It was incredible.