Getting out on stage and playing music for people feels great when people are cheering for you, that's obviously really exciting. But what's most exciting is the idea that we're all experiencing something that's bigger than us.
I think that's why art prevails: because it helps people in a fairly intangible, magical way feel more connected to each other.
I don't believe in the myth of the "self made man". Nobody gets through alone.
I'll force myself to sit down and read a couple of chapters of a great book or I'll force myself to sit and listen to some amazing music or I'll go see a play. I find that watching or experiencing other forms of art gets my brain in action. It makes me feel connected to the creative energies and then that tends to get things going.
I think the future and the past are equally hypothetical.
I grew up with a rotary phone in my house and that seems a world away, but that's what I was used to as a kid. So now things seem complicated to me, but to kids born right now, they don't feel complicated.
If you make everything really on the nose so everyone knows exactly what you're talking about, it's often not as strong.
I used to be so young, how did I get so old?
It's the sick and twisted male fantasy that we want classy ladies out in the world that make us look good, but in the bedroom, men want subservient women who please all of their whims. It's the typical bullshit of male ego.
There's when a phrase circles in my head in a number of ways for any number of days, weeks, or months, and then that eventually becomes a song. There's a slow permeation of the idea and then that leads into a bunch of themes and becomes a bunch of lines.
I can predict with some sense of certainty how life will feel in a month. I can with the same logic remember with the same element of reality or truth what life was like a month ago. All perspectives on the past are entirely relative.
We talk about the past like it's the strangest dream. Then we repeat the things we never dreamed we'd do.
If the point of good art is to be somewhat subtle then it's not going to catch everyone.
The idea that things intrinsically were just better is so stupid to me because they never were. It's all relative.
I remember somebody saying, "I feel really bad for kids growing up around iPads right now. It's just too complicated. Life's too complicated." I think, yeah, but I remember being a kid and holding up a new piece of technology that was made in the '80s and my grandparents going, "Oh, it's too complicated." It didn't seem complicated to me.
When you ask my three year old if my iPhone is too complicated, it's not. It's all relative.
The idea that things used to be better is fantasy. It's putting a halo on something that no one can disprove.
To say, "It used to be better," nobody can say, "Well, no it wasn't." It's like telling a story that is self-aggrandizing about someone who has passed away, when they can't tell the other side of the story.
I don't necessarily think I look to books for ideas, but sometimes when I'm in the process of reading a great book, I just think about it all of the time.
I was an English major in university and that got me into novels, but I read a lot of books as a kid.
More than anything, being an English major made me more appreciative of authors and what an incredible feat it is to just finish a novel, let alone a really brilliant one.
I think books are just a great ticket to get you outside of yourself. You can not be you for a second and live in the shoes of a character, which is a special thing.
I'm influenced in a million different ways by a million songs that I've heard and digested.
Sometimes I just don't have time to wait for the muse to come, so I've developed things to force the muse to come back.
I feel like songwriting changed from something that I liked doing to something that, I feel, is a very important outlet for me to digest all the things around me. Once I put thoughts into a song, I can let it go, it doesn't bug me anymore you know what I mean? It's kind of a catharsis.
