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

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.

There are just some things that you can't deny.

I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.

For me, it's always been important to have the live band be one thing, and the recorded band be kind of another thing.

A record is worth 10,000 live shows.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.