'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

Kid problems are when you're bummed because girls don't like you or something silly, but then you get older and people start dying and going broke and whatever. People get sick. When you get older these things just happen.

All of the agreed-upon pariahs throughout pop-culture history put their identities into the thing we decry. And yet we derive our own identities from the act of hating. We connect on the things we are disappointed in. Some may argue that nothing in history gathers a crowd like complaining about Lady Gaga's meat dress.

I don't believe any genre of music can be unilaterally dismissed (aside from like, white-power music or something).

Any art that you are playing based on effort, loses something. I think that most of the time it should be something that happens, and you are inspired, and you just feel and follow your instincts. The best chiseled sculptures happen when the sculptor looks at the stone and says "I saw this sculpture in the stone, and I had to get it out." It's not contrived.

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.

Self-deprecating or arrogant, it's all selfish. Hard as it is, life's better when you spend more time on the rest of the world