I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.