To be told that you're the voice of your generation is such an incredible amount of pressure, and I haven't faced that. Maybe by the time our third record rolls around, I will. My goals are to be a band like that in five years. At the moment, though, I can't really relate in any sense to the scale that Kurt Cobain fame has reached.

Recovery culture teaches you that you have to repent. I don't think that's necessary.

If I play Coachella, it's sponsored by a company - that's corporate, too. But we're playing it because we're getting paid and we want to be a part of the festival.

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

It's not like I had a breakdown, though it kind of felt like it at the time. I agreed to everything that happened. You can't really be at work and be like, "That's it. I've had too much. I'm going home."

It's totally true: Ariel, Christopher Owens, me, and Courtney Love, all in Saint Laurent ads, all with the same haircut.

There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.