You want songs to sound cohesive with the other songs on the record but when you first start writing you just want to write to tell the truth.

Well, the funny thing is, you are never the same person that you were the day before.

Most of the time a spark of beauty or truth will start a fire of a song but fires rarely produce goodness on their own ... you need to control them and put them to work.

The biggest problem facing our world today is a lack of hope and a lack of meaning. [It's] basically just a postmodern world in which there is no right or wrong, no better or worse.

Hope is not a substitute for pain. Hope is in spite of pain.

I'm always thinking about songs, I'm thinking of life maybe a little bit more lyrically than a computer programmer or someone like that.

It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about.