Actual patriotism has to do with loving a place enough to try and improve it.

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.

When I was living in Boston I worked in this store that played the college radio station. I had to listen to it all day, and I didn't care for most of it.

I think when you've been in a band for a really long time, sometimes you don't appreciate what's good about yourself. It's easy to play something and get too focused on some small detail. It's helpful to have somebody around who can say, "No, that was good." Just so you don't get too lost or forget what you do. You need somebody you really trust who has great taste.

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

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.