I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam [Fogarino]. Greg [ex-drummer] is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."

I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.

Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.