The music industry is such a huge machine. There are still a lot of good people in it, but the character of the industry and the culture of the industry is very fast.

Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together. Technology has a lot to do with how the world is developing at the moment because there are very raw and pure and primal emotions that people are communicating to each other over the Internet. It's like our new feathers, our new face paint. We're still trying to find love and friendship and cool music, but now it's over the Internet.

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

I try to be genuine. I try to be real. It's such a subjective thing, but I try to convey an emotion.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity. So maybe I bring people into that pop world who don't usually find themselves there because there's not enough stuff for them to get excited about otherwise. I try to be genuine. I try to be real. It's such a subjective thing, but I try to convey an emotion.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.