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I want to make myself and the crowd happy by way of something different, and that makes things difficult. I'm never playing something that hasn't been released or no one has ever heard before because I care to deliver them what they were hoping to see from me. But also I play four or five songs that will definitely surprise them.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

We simply write the kind of music we enjoy most and hope that our audience will enjoy it too.

We want to pull out songs from the American song book, and we want to make them palatable for a modern audience.

You never know what's going to play into what's worthy of getting encapsulated into a song.

I'm so hard on myself that when I'm in the studio, I'll write 10 songs and only use one. So those nine songs that are left over, I always think, 'Where could these go? Who could they be for?'

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

There's a wide spectrum of possibilities in how to deliver a song.

The music industry is saying, This is the format, and if you'll fit into this format, you can be on radio, and if radio will play you, MTV will expose you, and MTV will expose you, we'll sell records.