“We had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn’t get arrested a year later.”

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 you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I’ve always been able to rely on.

A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.

Around that same time I started running. I never saw myself as the kind of person who would become a runner. It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever run three miles, let alone 26.2.

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.

There are the people that are like, “I want it to sound like 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.

I just rediscovered my guitar.

The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time.

Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.

I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

You never know if you have met your best friend in life yet. That still may be to come.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

I’m just gonna make art myself. I have a lot of ideas of things I wanna do and really talented people and friends I’m around, so we decided to make our own thing and set out to do it.

Poor people will do almost anything to avoid problems. They see a challenge and they run…the secret to success, my friends, is not to try to avoid or get rid of or shrink from your problems; the secret is to grow yourself so that you are bigger than your problems.

Our – our friends can’t trust us anymore. You know, Ukraine was a nuclear-armed state. They gave away their nuclear arms with the understanding that we would protect them. We won’t even give them offensive weapons.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families