I was a very good student until about sophomore year, and that's when I just became so disillusioned with the whole thing that I just became an awful student. I was still making good grades. But I was cutting class three days a week and faking papers that I got off the internet.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

It's a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.

Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

In the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's worth owning.

I'd been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure touring and stress.

I have tried to write soundtracks, and the main problem with those was that the directors often had in their minds a much stronger sense of what they wanted to hear, than what I was willing to give them, and I guess there was no way to say, "Well why don't you write your scene around my music?" Because that's just cocky and awful.