Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

Once I got to know what's been happening historically, it's pretty impossible to un-know it. Like right now, there's the outbreak of cholera in Haiti, and people see that as a news headline, but I know there's half a billion dollars of aid that one senator is putting a hold on, that the Red Cross has raised half a billion dollars but has only spent $200 million.

When I was younger, bands helped me connect to part of my humanity; bands that had nothing to do with anything political helped to form me. There's a correlation in that: If people can connect to music, maybe they can connect to each other.

Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

A lot of artists write about the same things their whole career.

If I was a cabinetmaker or a commercial fisherman, it would be the same question - how to connect to my world. The job we do affords us the opportunity to have people listen to what we say. But a lot of people have a similar situation: They're trying to find a way to do some good.

Years ago, in order to stay sane, I had to really make an effort not to think about how people view us. There's just so much noise, positive and negative, and not much good comes out of thinking about it.