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There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.

I am totally unapologetic about pop music.

I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.

There are certainly things labels can still provide that indie artists can't. They can pave the way to radio and pay big bucks for promotion.

I think people who just know me from my band think I don't like pop music. The truth is I love pop music.

A lot of people these days are not music lovers - they just want to be famous which is a very different thing to what I grew up believing in.

I love pop music, but I feel like the genre is overpopulated - there was so much bubblegum for a while, but I feel like Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran are bringing good, real music back to the radio.

People assume that a lot of pop artists don't write their songs. That, for me, is super frustrating because I think it detracts from some of the art and some of the craft of what we do. I'm at the helm of it, and I think that is what people don't see.

Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.

Superficial pop will always exist - there've always been Fabians - but when people like Dire Straits and Bruce Hornsby start having hits, it suggests that there's a revolution going on in music.