The best pop music is the songs that a group of people can dance to, but you can also listen to in your bed and cry. That's something obviously that The Beatles started and... so having that darkness there opens another door.

As straight Americans we have two choices: we can choose to sit back and enjoy our rights as we have them, or we can realize that it is actually not freedom at all when our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues do not share these basic rights.

The same way all the people I love factor in—my parents, my sister, my girlfriend [Lena Dunham], my best friend, all the people I love are always right there. I don't have a lot of people in my life, but there's a small group of people that I don't like to do things without.

I first met Taylor Swift at an awards show, which is a pretty easy place to suss out who is cool. Right off the bat I was like, This is a person I want to know. Just because she's a very famous person doesn't mean she doesn't exist outside of that space. She's wonderful and special and treats me really nicely and we have a great, mature relationship. She's on a short list of people like that for me.

My father played guitar, so I always wanted to play for that reason. But I think the biggest reason was just the '90s in general - growing up listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and bands like that, and going to concerts and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world.

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare.

I think fans get bored of the pre-roll. I also think they don't care about the pre-roll, they just want the album.