It's tough enough to have a relationship, and it hurts enough to have it not work.

There are only so many hours you can sit on the bus and watch TV or play basketball or whatever we do to pass the time before we go out onstage.

I'm proud of the fact that I'm at a point in my career that if I want to take a little bit of a left turn and make an album that is more hushed, more acoustic and more personal, that I can do it.

What you see is kinda what you get with me. I'm a very real person, or I hope to be, anyway. I don't have nothing to hide

As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job.

The beauty is that it's all a part of this wonderful dream I had in college. It's beautiful to see what it's turned into. It's the journey that I'm most proud of.

I had a notepad and I wrote down 30 things to make myself better just off the top of my head, and the next day I started to do that.