I decided at 10 I wanted to be in a band; everyone else wanted to play football.

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.

I guess my path feels sort of different now... I don't know what's going to happen, but I certainly want to make music a bigger part of my life in the future than it has been for the last couple of years.

You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.

I bring a record home, and it connects with me like nothing else. In my ideal situation, somebody will do that with my record.

Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it.