There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing.

I always find live shows on film kind of boring. Even my favorite ones, I kinda zone out for most of it. It's just so different seeing a band in the flesh and then watching a film of it, even if you have a hundred cameras and it's shot from every angle. There's just a communal, visceral thing that never translates very well.

The film Black Orpheus is one of my favorite films of all time, which is set in Carnival in Brazil.

Being in a rock band, I feel a certain responsibility to have a weird haircut. I mean, who else gets to do that?

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.

I don't think the emotional quality is the defining quality of the music but it's definitely something that people have picked up on a lot