You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.

There is a beauty to touring - to be honest, there's a way that music connects and you really feel the actual reaction of people to the music that you're making, and I feel like if I didn't do that I just wouldn't know, and I don't think my music would be the same.

The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song.... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics...and I find that quite inspiring.

I didn't realize how different our band's senses of melody actually were. I would write a part that just made perfect sense to me, but for them, it was mind-boggling. Likewise, they could play stuff with relative ease that I never could have. If there was something lost in translation melodically, it wouldn't work at all - we'd just be 17 people in a giant room staring awkwardly at each other. When that happened, I'd go home, figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then return to smooth sailing.

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