I think it's crucially important to be present in the lives of your children. They are my most important cause that I fight for. But I also feel an added responsibility that I want to leave them a better world than this one that we have now.

In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

Always question the authority.

I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.

I think I was meant to be a musician who speaks his mind about social justice issues. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, but a family that had enough money to buy a $50 guitar and a $50 amplifier, and had a basement to rehearse in. What I think the global human cost of this horrific poverty is how many Mozarts or curers of cancer are slaving away in the Maquiladoras along the Tijuana border, or in the Indonesian sweat shops? There are billions of people who will never become the people they could be, or the people they were meant to be, due to crushing poverty.

Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show.