A songwriter's heart is pure when they have the desire to keep digging deeper into music. And invariably, when you dig deeper it always leads you into the past.

Nowadays, everybody assumes, when the wake up in the morning, if they have a question, it will get answered. Because they have the internet. No matter what the question is, someone will answer their question.

You can't do better than that.

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, 'What are you doing this Saturday?' and they'll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, 'Man, I'm really into remote-controlled steamboats.'

It seemed like there was no control over it. I think certain things just popped. God was blessing us in telling us that certain things were going the way they were supposed to go.

It's harder to put yourself in a place where you could easily be seen as a fake. But that's more interesting to me.

I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I'm not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don't want to come off egotistical.