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We wanted to sit down and conceptually work out songs.

Well, obviously I wanted it to sound as original as possible. I suppose the influences that we had were probably from the actual power point of view we wanted to be like the Who. Vocally we wanted to be like the Beach Boys, whatever was good at the time.

The whole music world is based on the young, the very young people.

We became the songs we wrote.

I don't play an instrument - I just write in my head, and I usually hear fully formed songs. 'We Are Young' turned out so much like it was in my head. But it also exceeded all my expectations.

Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed.

We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.

We knew we wanted to put a lot of melody into it - a lot more than what we did on our first album.

I think the theme of the album probably was just that it was our first record.

When we started the band, it was because we were waiting for a sound that never happened. We got tired of waiting, and we decided to just do it ourselves.