“There’s a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.”

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn’t get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don’t even want.

I don’t spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself – and if other people like it, that’s great.

I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.

I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don’t have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could.

There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I’d always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, “I will never live in fear again.”

I’d like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack.

We wanted to be like R.E.M., but the reality is that 15 years after R.E.M. was putting out those records, the playing field had changed drastically as well.

We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”

As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.

Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There’s something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of ‘Plans’ came out of samples and vocal lines.

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you’re listening to the song because they’re so seamless and clever.

To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.

I have always been very open and earnest about some things in my life, some things that are not directly in my life, but they’re twirling around me at the time.

There were two recording studios in Bellingham. One was really expensive, a “nice studio.” We were at the point where we were young and irreverent.

As photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as they approach, group and regroup as you shift your position.

We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days – our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency.

You may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!

Try to bring me down, but you will never succeed because I’m always moving upward. Maybe not before, but now … I am.

Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.

All bodies are slow in growth but rapid in decay.

That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

If you want to be rich, be friends with people who have the same mindset as you, or who at least won’t try to change your mindset to be more like theirs. Life is too short to spend time with people who don’t help you move forward.