“When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.”

“I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.”

“… I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you. That you were the center of everything I did and felt and thought.”

“I stared at him. Did he really say that? Did he remember? The way he looked back at me, one eyebrow raised, I knew he did. And this time, I was the one to look away.
Because I remembered. I remembered everything.”

“Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it’s because I’m thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it’s all coming back to writing. I don’t really do anything that isn’t about writing, and I don’t really know who I am if I’m not thinking about writing.”

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”

“I haven't found it difficult because I find this very enjoyable. It's really challenging. And I'm really proud of the record because it's a really good record. There's nothing harder than to write a pop record with meaning. I think it's much easier to be alternative. It's much easier to be different and take a different path outside of a commercial context. To try and write a pop song that is not cliché, to try and write a pop song that has meaning and fits in under three minutes and five seconds and has a hook that people want to listen to is the most difficult thing in the world to do. So in lieu of that you have to write what you know and what you like, what you're feeling. That's all I can basically do. I don't begrudge the other people that don't write their songs. And I don't judge them. I'd like to see more people writing their own songs, because that's just personally what I like. Just for me, as an artist, so many people only care about being popular right now. Whatever happened to trying to write a song that means something? When I was growing up, artists meant something. They had opinions, they looked different than the person working at the store on your street. They opened your eyes and taught you something about life. And I would like to aspire to be that kind of artist.”

“I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.”

“I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song, […] It's more like you write what comes to you… You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave…”

“I can't say that I'm crazy, you know, about watching this. I don't like the person who I was back at this time, and-and, uh… I think I had all my priorities in the wrong places and I think if I were to spend to much time playin guitar as I did picking out stupid shorts and stupid hats and stupid, you know, overcoats, I would've… I would've been able to write some good songs, you know? I can't watch this version of myself and be at all happy about it. I want to… I want to strangle myself when I see this video. I was 18 years old. 18-year-old that deserved to be slapped upside his head.”