Nobody is strong 100 percent of the time, or falling apart 100 percent of the time; sometimes you're doing both at once.

No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

If there's a strong melodic thing somewhere, whether that's in a vocal or in a guitar part or a sample. Something that sticks in your brain, that seems to be something that works.

I think in reading a few sentences of text you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers.

Writing with other people is the only way I ever really work. In some ways it's great because it's helpful to someone pull you out of the loop.

Nobody is strong 100 percent of the time, or falling apart 100 percent of the time; sometimes you're doing both at once.

I think I have a vested interest in thinking that the lyrics are important, but I think for us it's important that we all write things that mean something to us, and I think we're not really in the business of writing la-la-love-you chart pop songs. It needs to have a personal pulling in the gut for me, to want to write anything about it.