That's happened a couple times: Billy Joel. It was just, "You sound like Billy Joel." And I get really upset about that. No offense to that guy, but it's not for me.

When I hear my favorite songwriters write about things they clearly have not experienced, like "Isis" by Bob Dylan or a lot of Bruce Springsteen songs or something like that, I'm always like, "Man, how do I tap into that?" Every time I tried to do something that wasn't autobiographical I felt pretty phony.

I was 21, and I was like, "Man, am I really gonna start over and try this whole thing over again? Do I want to start over and be in a rock band again and try to act like a 17-year-old for as long as I can?" Because that was what I was doing with Simon Dawes band. I decided that if I was going to go on playing music, I was going to try and work on it. So I got into Leonard Cohen and Will Oldham, guys that really inspired me not only as songwriters but also through their music as people, and that's kind of what the shift was for me.

I think that the oversaturation of music market right now will eventually start taking care of itself, where some bands are like, "We just don't want to do it anymore," and other bands say, "Things just keep getting better." It just depends on where you bring your joy out of it. We're lucky because we are happiest when we're onstage.

The one thing I worry about with that is whether or not we're edgy enough for the young kids. You know, does a 20-year-old like the fact that he can play it for his dad? Is that cool?

Dawes kind of, on purpose, were like, "Let's realize that we're going to make less money, but let's try to get as many fans from as many kind of demographics as we can." And I feel really lucky that our music exists in this world where we can open for artists like M. Ward or Bright Eyes, and then on the same side of that open for Alison Krauss.

I understand why some bands don't like test new songs, but for us it's been very helpful and it hasn't really backfired. I was nervous that our second record was - you know, you could hear the whole thing on YouTube before the album came out because we played it all live, but it ended up being something that people appreciated.