That 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.

It sucks to think about, honestly, but when you really consider the resources that it takes to press vinyl records, or the amount of gas that it takes to tour, it's really quite scary.

Sometimes 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.

In an interview John [Linnell] said, 'At a certain point you just get tired of the way the other person breathes,' and I took that pretty hard because I, personally, am infatuated with the way John breathes.

All rock music is fake news.

To a lot of people, angels are a matter of faith.

I feel like musicians have such a precarious place in the political discourse, because musicians are, sort of just by nature, people-pleasers.