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To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

All I'm really interested in musically is trying to make concept albums. Serving a larger sum than the parts.

I've made a few albums in such an autonomous way; it often has been exhausting. It's almost difficult to enjoy the process when you take on so much.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

An album is a thing you take time out and go work on.

It's easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

In all the years that I've been doing this, I've never launched a tour and launched an album at basically the same time. Doing one of those things is enough!

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.

I don't think a lot of bands and artists work as hard as we do on the creation, on the writing, the arrangements and the recording in our format.