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" So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music. "

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" One of my best friends, Mike, had a kid. Just seeing him go through it all was inspiring. It would be so nice to care about someone more than yourself. And Mike is a total delinquent, so if he can do it, I figure I can, too. "

" I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme. "

" It's dangerous to buy into praise and criticism for what you do when you're trying to present your music to people. I don't ignore it completely, but I don't dwell on it too much. "

" I think that, with anything creative, you should have the freedom to experiment, and that experimentation means not feeling totally responsible for how other people perceive it. "

" Once you realize that everyone is in the same boat, that everyone is just as insecure and childlike as everyone else, that all these jokers in D.C. ruining our world are just greedy kids grabbing for marbles - I think that realization means you're an adult. "

" When you're 16 or 17, I think like most people that age, the first time you experience certain things in life, whether it's heartbreak or death or love, obviously it's going to seem like a much bigger deal. "

" If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand. "

" I've thought about the idea of, 'Can happiness and creativity co-exist?' So much of what I've done, I think, has been based on being dissatisfied or incomplete or lonely. The answer is, 'There isn't an answer, necessarily.' "

" The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions. "

" I've always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about. "

" My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme. "

" I have many friends who are both Mexican and Mexican-American and others who, I guess you would say, are somewhere in between. The ironic thing is that all three of those categories often exist inside of the same family. "

" Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it. "

" When you look at what people consider success in the music industry, it's just terrible music. "

" There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions. "

" It's human nature to wonder. "

" My family is Catholic. I went to a Catholic school, that kind of thing, so that was my childhood for sure. "

" On good days, I can see the inherent goodness in people, and that human beings have a high capacity to learn and adapt. But things like the environment, nuclear weapons and ideas like peak oil - if you think about them too much, they can really freak you out. "

" Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my all-time favorite writers. I feel spiritual when reading his words, even though they're translated. I wish desperately that I could read it in its original language. I already feel like I'm going to church when I read him; imagine if I could read it in the original. "

" The first music I ever got into was the '80s alternative bands that my brother listened to, like The Cure and The Smiths and R.E.M. and Fugazi. I can remember specifically saying The Cure was my favorite band back in second grade. "

" To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic. "

" You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it. "

" I try to make all my songs good. I don't ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response. "

" I try to keep the idea that there's an audience in as little space in my mind as possible, but you can't erase it entirely, the idea that when you're sitting down to write a song, people are going to hear it. "

" I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world. "

" The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing. "

" I believe that vinyl will outlast CDs. "

" When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me. "

" I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom's the only reason I know it's a real thing. "

" When I run into a person or a kid that comes up and gives me the spiel about, 'Hey, I got your record at this time in my life, and it really helped me,' that stuff totally still rings true. If you're standing there talking to someone, it's really easy to tell if they're being authentic or not. And that's great. "