Louisville is a place with no labels. It’s not the South, it’s not Chicago, and you don’t think of it as you think of New York or LA. It has some Southern romanticism to it, but also a Northern progressivism, this weird urban island in the middle of the state of Kentucky that has always provided a fertile, often dark, bed. For us, Louisville and the surrounding areas are the center of massive creativity and massive weirdness. The place has its flaws: You move away, but you’re always going to come back.

I keep wanting people to realize that there needs to be a tidal wave of peace and love. People should be treated with love and respect regardless of the color of their skin or their sexual preference. We need to keep saying that as much as we can and as loud as we can.

I feel like hate and darkness get so much airtime. We need to give peace and love as much airtime as we can. We need to be teaching our kids that it's okay to love whoever you want to love, and it's okay to be who you want to be, and it's okay to feel that everybody should be treated equally and with respect. Such simple things that I don't know why it's hard for people to understand.

I wish we had a more open discourse. It's just a shame that with our 24-hour news media and the Internet, people have become so fragmented. They only want to support their own worldview.

For me, changing the sound and listening to new music - that's just so fun. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You're never going to please everybody. I feel that at the end of the day, I should make what I want to make since somebody is going to hate it and somebody is going to love it too. I can't control that.

I think it's every artist's dream to create something that will endure, something that people will listen to until there are no more people on earth to listen to things.

I can't understand how some bands are criticized for doing something different and other bands are rewarded for doing things different. At the end of the day, I throw my hands up in the air and say, "F**k it." I've come to accept that no matter what we do, there's going to be somebody out there on the Internet that says it's a piece of s**t and somebody who says they really like it. That's happened with every single album we've put out.