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.

While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.

My favorite English teacher in high school showed me 'Brazil' when I was 15 and it blew my mind. It's one of those movies that's revealed itself in different ways as I've gone back to it over the years.

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.

It would get really alienating, to have my face be the face of a cause. So much just comes down to the songs. I just want to give us the opportunity to write great songs. Even our work in Haiti is limited by how good our songs are. We just need to get rid of as much of the bullshit as possible, so we can have a life, so we have something to write about.

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

A lot of stuff is dark in a way, but unless you're really looking at a situation for what it actually is, it's hard to be hopeful - or meaningless to be hopeful about it unless it's actually based in a real possibility.