“I couldn’t wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.”

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It’s a language aside from the language they have with strangers.

I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

For me, a song doesn’t really take flight until it has a lyric on it. …Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.

The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums.

Every record we do there are always two camps. There’s the camp that’s like, “I love it. It sounds different than the last one.”

You can’t please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.

We always idealize the past because we don’t feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It’s a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.

Nada Surf and Harvey Danger are good bands. I think they’ve just stayed true to why they play music in the first place, it’s just because they love doing it and they love each other and that’s the impetus for doing it, not trying to keep singles on the radio and on MTV.

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.”

If it’s putting on a great dance record and rocking out in your apartment, do it. If kissing someone for 10 minutes makes you feel confident, do it.

I first heard Laura Branigan sing live in my brother Nesuhi’s apartment, where we had gone because he had a very good piano. I immediately realized that she had a great pop voice, in the classical sense.

I’m a teenager, but I’m independent – I have my own apartment, I have my own life.

I love Obama. He’s my favorite president of all time. I have a giant picture in my apartment in New York that is of his Chicago Tribune cover, Mr. President.

What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

It would be a little bit hard to fit a treehouse in a New York City apartment.

Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.