Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Once you do have a child you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends and it should be.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

I've never had so much fun being back at my job sitting in front of my computer. Compared to 10 months on the road, going home and sleeping in my own bed every night is really nice.

A person with grace is somebody who's socially graceful or is a classy person, but sometimes you just feel the opposite of that, and you just feel like a jerk and a loser and a weirdo.

It's not hard to connect with the music on an emotional level and get inside the songs. It's odd, very vulnerable, and slightly embarrassing to be standing and singing and playing music in front of a bunch of strangers.

There are records that you just sink into. They coincide with what you’re going through and become an ally. If our records do that for people, that’s the greatest compliment I could ever receive. That’s one of the reasons making music is so important to me, because there’s a very strange emotional reach. For me—more than books or movies or other things—music is like a mainline to your heart.