If you do the right thing, the right thing will come down the path.
They say what doesn't kill the soul will make you stronger, but you can't be a stone-hearted man.
For a really long time, I've been trying to find balance where I can talk about my feelings and be upfront with people, confront issues and not have to beat them to death or ignore them.
I'm still learning, but I can see there are decisions in life that are going to be very challenging and it's always better to get through them, always.
I got really lucky when I found somebody that I want to be friends with forever.
If you start getting yourself into just doing stuff for the money, even if it's a desperate situation, I just firmly believe that if you stick it out through that, then something right will come down the path.
I deal with everything in my life in music - everything that ever happens to me just finds its way into a song or onto a record. I need it. It's like my life jacket. If I didn't have that way of processing those feelings, I'd probably be a murderer.
I don't think anything has changed about me but my priorities have changed. At one point I was living my life and I didn't see a direct correlation between who I was affecting with my actions. I'm not as reckless, I'm probably not as fun or funny. I've turned to my dad's sense of humor. I think that having a family has put a lot more focus on what I do.
As far as keeping my sanity, it's something I've only recently tried to focus on as a means of self-preservation.
I hated old people as a young kid who thought he knew anything about punk rock. I just thought old people sucked and I thought their opinions sucked.
When you write a song you're more or less saying, "This is everyone. I think this is everyone." It doesn't necessarily have to be this thing where I go out and I'm like candy-striping, or becoming a therapist or something. I think that maybe, maybe I'm supposed to [be a musician], because of that fact.
I can't imagine anybody in my life I've been more vulnerable with than my wife.
For me, making music in general is a therapeutic process. It began as a way for me to meet friends, and when you're a kid just screaming your face off, you're processing anger; you're processing all the things that happened to you, whether it's mistrust or confusion, whether you've gone through abuse.
My mother, father and brothers (I was the youngest of three boys), were all very sarcastic and we were a complete Irish-Catholic family. We didn't talk about our feelings ever, and if we did, we were yelling about them - there was no in-between. That's just carried over so many ways in my life and sabotaged relationships, sabotaged creative stuff.
I'm three years into my recovery from heroin and all this stuff and I want to be able to help people. But they have to do it on their own.
It does feel really good to sing songs about somebody that I really respect, admire, love, care about and am so passionately attracted to after all this time.
I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.
