“I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla’s bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, “Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play.””

I don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.

Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones.

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. … Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

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.

Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it

We had no refrigerator, no shower or tub, and no privacy. My parents shared the bedroom with my sister and me.

Every actor has three versions of each scene – the one that you rehearse the night before, in your bedroom.

Our cellar home had a kitchen and a combination bedroom and half bath, which meant we had a sink next to the bed.

We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren’t rich – but we felt secure.

They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

It was just me in my bedroom. It gave me freedom and made me happy.

My pop is this big, huge man, nothing can hurt him. I went running into his bedroom like, ‘Daddy, Daddy, the boogie man’s under the bed!’ Pop opens one eye, he’s like, ‘Is the boogie man bigger than me?’ ‘