People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you have four people writing lyrics instead of one person, the lyrics are going to be a little more broad.
I don't like to get too specific about lyrics. It places limitations on them, and spoils the listeners' interpretation.
Lyrics have become so dumbed down nowadays. People don't want to have to think about lyrics anymore, they just want to be told something. Until these great things started happening with us, I'd really given up on reaching people like that.
I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.
The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.
I deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
I've gotten to a point where I don't want lyrics to mean anything.
I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.