We're covering all our bases so we can do whatever we want next time. That's how we're looking at it, rather than this just being an endless number of album/tour cycles.

Our day-to-day lives recording and touring aren't that different from those of Metallica, even though the perceived worldview is totally different. So that can be a difficult thing to reconcile sometimes.

The touring thing is such a huge time commitment. I'm really feeling like I want to start writing and recording music again. But I have to leave for tour tomorrow. That's kind of frustrating; at the end of the day, you're plugging into this lifestyle. It's the "band lifestyle," and that's weird! I would like for touring to be creative in its own right.

You want to make music that reflects your ideals, but considering the isolating process of recording and the time and energy requirements of touring, there aren't a lot of opportunities to express those ideals anywhere but the music itself.

At the end of the day, for people in this position, you just need to make something that feels like you're expressing yourself honestly, something that you'd want to listen to. The rest of the aesthetic is kind of bullshit, and I don't mean that in a negative way - just that it's a choice.

I'm looking forward to doing things more intuitively in the future, just going with whatever happens and not immediately categorizing it as potentially good or bad or original or whatever.

You want to think about certain styles of music as being reflective of a certain culture or a certain time or a point of view. You don't want it to be just an intellectual exercise.