It's cool to have critical success because it's always nice for your peers to say, 'Good job.' But who cares about them?

You may be pulling from different influences because of different things that are going on in your life, different people that are around you and more experiences to pull from.

The real reason we ended up getting into that type of music was our dad worked for an oil company so we spent a year overseas when we were young kids. Because of that, it was all Spanish TV and radio so we ended up having these '50s and '60s tapes, tapes of that music.

I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.

It's hard to find people to trust in the record industry, always. It's an industry with a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of people who are in positions of power that really know nothing and care for nothing. So I think, yeah, you learn pretty early on that you've really got to trust yourself more than anybody else, and that nobody's going to care about what you do more than you.

Save a tree, eat a beaver.

When you become a band and you've got people who want to be a part of your experience or want to get close to you for what you are, not who you are, you have that challenge of trying to find out who's genuine.