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.

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.

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.

I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament - Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts.

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.

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