And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.

When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.

When we signed with Warner Bros., they knew what they were getting. They knew they weren't going to get some easily manipulated prepackaged pop group. That was not going to happen. What they wanted, I think, was the integrity that we had to offer. What they wanted was the kind of street cred or cache that R.E.M. could bring to them and the chance that we would give them a hit or two. What happened was we gave them a bunch of hits. And we became huge.

Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.

By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.

I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.