The simplest app on your smartphone requires 40 peoples' purest imagination. The challenges with people on environment, we just have to open some of that creativity. But I don't think it's necessarily about heating clouds or enormous chemical changes in the atmosphere.
John FlansburghThere is a fact-based belief system available to you if you want to believe in facts. But this is the weirdest time. I mean, after Nixon I thought nothing could be weirder. Then there was Reagan, and after Reagan I thought nothing could be weirder. Then there was Bush and Bush's son, and it all just seemed like nothing could be a badder joke than George W. Bush. And now we're here. It seems to just yo-yo around, but hopefully we'll get to another level.
John FlansburghI guess the revival of vinyl records is not helping the environmental problem. Although, in some ways, people don't throw records away - I mean, I still have records from when I was 5. So it doesn't seem quite so wasteful. But maybe I'm just lying to myself.
John FlansburghSometimes you have to wonder if there isn't an ejector seat built into having a popular-music career. We were lucky when we started. We were already old when we started - you could have described our first album as "aging Brooklyn guys." We were in our late 20s. We weren't octogenarians, but a lot of bands were already younger than us. Fortunately, we've held on to our manly good looks.
John FlansburghThat really sums up the strange bluntness that a really prime German interview can have. They're really interested in your cultural velocity in this way that I don't think people in the United States even necessarily think about alternative-rock bands. So it's not like we're against regular rock. We're not like a battling army shaking our weapons against The Rolling Stones.
John FlansburghBill O'Reilly knew he could just filibuster and enjoy all the airtime that a full interview would give him, and then also grab the sensationalist headlines that he enjoys creating. He used this as fodder for his show for weeks. I wouldn't want to be on the bad side of Bill O'Reilly. But then again, maybe I am now. By giving this interview.
John Flansburgh