It's this funny thing now: You sign up to be a musician because you want to write music, but you don't spend your time writing music. Instead, you go around the world selling the music you've already made.

Music is much more of a multimedia sort of thing than I expected.

The idea is: You played to 100 people this week in Europe, and then next week you can play to 200. It's an investment in that territory. But it can lose money because it's very expensive to go to Europe. You can't really just say, like, "Oh, we're gonna take our van and drive to California tomorrow." It's more like, "Oh, we have to fly to London and rent three guitar amps, a bass amp, drums; buy all these flights for four people; hire a driver."

There are a million things out there every single day that trigger me - songs, smells, even the season that we're in, fall. Something about the air.

Some kid can say, "Hey, I really want you to play my town in Switzerland, or Sweden, or Latvia," and they could have a fun night at the show. On the other hand, all those kids could have a record that means something to them in a more personal way a couple months down the road. The live band is a really important thing for us, but my focus is on the album now.

There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art.

We were a commodity used by corporations to make their brand look fashionable, but then they used us to keep kids out of venues.