“I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say it’s the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go.”

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’ve covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don’t think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.

Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.

I’m a war of head versus heart, it’s always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.

I think you just have to keep knocking down doors, you have to keep being aggressive, and even if somebody says ‘No’, then you have to knock on the next door.

For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: “Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison.”

I’ve got a long way to go to being the ultimate best, but I think my time is now. And I’m starting to enter my prime.

ISIS and Iran have declared war on America, and we need a commander in chief who will do everything necessary to keep our children safe.

Even when all is known, the care of a man is not yet complete, because eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.

HIV changed my life, but it doesn’t keep me from living.

I only weigh 220, so I have to do something to keep from being tossed around by all the guys who weigh 250 and more. I train hard, but I don’t try to get too big.

I don’t think that once you get to one level, you can relax. You’ve got to keep pushing.