When I tour I'm going to countries to play music for people. My presence in a country is not an endorsement or a condemnation of that country's policies. My presence in a country is an effort to connect with people through playing music.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.

In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.

I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.

I learned in the last few years that it's really unhappy and really unsustainable to try and base your well being on something as arbitrary as record sale and critical acclaim and the interests of the public. All of those things are so fickle. So my approach now to music is I want to make records that I love, and I hope that other people love them, then that's OK.

One problem with a lot of musicians is that they remove themselves in a studio and make a record and assume people are going to pay attention to it just because they've made it.