I don't mind critics. I mean, I wrote for Rolling Stone for a hot minute. I like criticism. I enjoy criticism. The thing I don't like is cruelty for cruelty's sake. You don't have to be a jerk to say something negative. You can say something in the negative sense and have class.

You could be your own spotlight!

You have total freedom. It's like, if you do a solo record, there are no restrictions and you can do whatever you want, good or bad. You can have these passing fancies where you go in to the studio one day and you want to do something like what you did on the way in. That's dangerous. You have to have some sort of focus.

There are some bands for whom that works very well and it's no disrespect to them because I'm sure there's something honest and natural about it, but for us I feel like it would be dishonest and kinda disrespectful to that artwork to do that. To be like: "Okay, we're going to go back and only play these songs, even though we have an hour to an hour and a half set and we gotta play more songs, but we'll skimp you on your extra half hour." That's just silly to me.

For some people, home is family and their mom's house or their girl or whatever, and I have those experiences as well, but the biggest thing for me is Chicago. I don't know how to explain it.

Theres no amount of money that makes you feel better when people think of you as a joke or a hack or a failure or ugly or stupid or morally empty.

There are two types of bands - there are the ones that are basically solo projects anyways, where there's clearly the one guy who's driving the ship and everyone else is just along for the ride. And then there was my band, where you have a few very disparate-taste, creative people who kind of meet in the middle somewhere.