I'm happy with the way everything turned out. Even the mistakes we've made I wouldn't take back because they ended up yielding something good.
As we get older, everyday feels longer, and although I know I’ll struggle, I will do my best to never get tired.
We all get old together/And we all get old forever.
If someone comes up to me at a show and talks to me, if they're not freaking out about meeting me, which I'm just not very good at dealing with, of course I'll talk to them. I'm mean, they're a person. I'm not a monster. It may sound like bullshit humility, but I'm just a dude making music. I'd be doing this if no one was listening.
I think looking at as, "Bands that release their music for free online only make their money from playing live," is not seeing the full picture. Maybe the dollars specifically come from shows, but people are coming to the shows because they heard the songs, they heard the songs because they are free on the Internet. It all builds into the same thing.
I think a lot why our lives shows are good is because of the crowd, and because of the energy that they bring. Also, there was a time when a lot of the people that came to our shows were a bunch of drunk bros. At a certain point, we decided we were going to start calling them out. We also decided to become more gay-positive and feminist and all that stuff, and that we were going to be really vocal about it. After that, our crowd became a lot friendlier, and honestly a lot more fun.
Bands now are always trying to make their presence known through social networking and whatnot, but that's just the same as bands before the Internet age trying to connect with fans in some other way. But I don't follow people on Facebook, I think that's creepy. I wouldn't want them following me on Facebook. I don't even have a mailing list.
We've done exactly what we've wanted. We never compromised to anyone and still managed to have a successful thing. I don't take that lightly. Yeah, we're really lucky to have had that.
I think me, Sean Bonnette and Laura Jane Grace, and a lot of the bands people feel that way about, we're just really honest in our lyrics. I think we got really lucky in that the right kind of people who would appreciate that heard us at the right time, because there are plenty of people that are honest in their lyrics.
Instead of just being a band that's constantly replacing members, we figured we'd done all of the stuff we wanted to do. It seemed to make sense to see if we could live our lives without the band.
