Weirdly, I was still trying to be the older brother, and trying to get him [Tom Berninger] to try to be more like me a little bit. Or not be more like me but... I was frustrated that he sometimes let things stop him in his life, and he let the wind get knocked out of his sails a few times.

I'm doing a little freelance work, and I think everybody's trying to take their minds off rock and roll for a little while and get some perspective.

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

I usually always think of characters and sometimes the characters are a little bit invented, so it's nice to give these invented, blurry, personas an actually name. It makes me get closer to them or something like that. But they're not all real, they're weird amalgamations of reality.

I think most people start rock bands in their early twenties or teens, but I was almost thirty at the time when the band started really doing anything and it took another several years before people started caring about us.

I have pit bulls barking at me on half of the love songs.

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.