Music is made by individuals. Some artists will be very politically overt in their songs, some will be more subtle. You have to be true to yourself, true to your nature.

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

I think filmmakers all secretly wanna be musicians and all musicians secretly wanna be filmmakers.

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.

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

Whenever you do anything or say anything, you're opening yourself up to criticism. But that's okay.

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.