A lot of the music that I grew up loving has a really political bent to it.

The biggest thing this has in common with almost all of our records is the dualities are still there. We kind of stripped down the other things we were writing about, and that's what was left. A lot of good things have happened to us in the last couple of years both as a band and in our personal lives. But something as wonderful as having children also brings along these new fears and terrors and responsibilities.

I'm more interested in writing about the personal stories of people. Sometimes I don't agree with them.

At any given time, there might be someone who's eight years old or 80 years old in the audience. Some nights there are a lot of girls in the audience, some nights not. It's so unpredictable, but I like that.

I dislike Bush as much as probably anybody on earth could, but having said that... It's not like I'm going to change anybody's mind.

You can be for something and still be damaged by it.

I feel like, as a people, we're sort of stumbling in the dark right now.