Trayvon Martin did not need to die.

Life is weird, great and dangerous.

I mean Black Flag happened. I was lucky. I don't think I could have put together something with one percent of that oomph on my own.

Since the last tour I have done a lot of extensive travel to Iraq, Kuwait, Siberia, South Korea and other places and picked up some hopefully interesting stories. We are living in interesting times and as bad as things are, I draw considerable inspiration from some of the things I'm seeing and people I'm meeting. I'm looking forward to getting out on the road and talking about it all.

If it were a choice between me getting killed or one of my friend's kids, I would happily take the shot.

The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.

I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend.