When we got to the step when we'd normally start collaborating, we started having these talks about how it was not worth getting together. Getting together just didn't feel very inspired, and doing it alone did.

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 look back and see pictures of yourself, or hear an old song, and you know where that came from or why you were working on that - but you don't want to do that again. You don't necessarily hate it, but you're a very different person now, so, in that way you do.

I was writing music when we finished the last Walkmen record, Heaven, and a few of these songs may have even been started before Heaven was done. With The Walkmen we all wrote a lot of stuff alone, but then we'd start collaborating with each other.

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.

I never want to travel while I'm on vacation anymore. The only vacations I want to take now are ones where I just go and sit somewhere.

I'm really not into the idea of just faking songs with a synthesizer. That just isn't the music I'm making at all.