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.

A label is like a bank with all these really important relationships, and maybe an aesthetic or a point of view. But if you only want to release two songs, you don't need the guy who can talk to all the retailers, because they're not going to stock two songs.

I only write maybe one or two songs every couple of years that I think are good enough to play alone without other stuff happening.

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 lyrics to me are a result of the emotional and creative climate present while making the record as well as personally going through a sort of mid-twenties stock-taking.

The only thing I think about is doing something where I'm the only person making all the decisions - I think that would be fun to do, just to get it out of my system. And honestly, I kind of got it out of my system when I recorded three songs and put them online. That was enough of a solo experience for me; it scratched that itch.

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.