"You never know when you put out an album that's unique whether it'll get beat up for it or not."
"Rock and roll is - and should be - a kid's place."
"It's a tough thing to know that when you're making your album, you're going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying."
"A lot of 18-year-olds are like old men. They think they've seen everything."
"I'm older than I was, and I'm still washed-up, and I haven't changed my music one iota. It's just much easier to do this when people are being nice to you."
"I used to do this big rant at the end of some gigs with Ben Folds Five. The band broke into this big heavy metal thing and I started as a joke to scream in a heavy metal falsetto. I found myself saying things like: Feel my pain, I am white, feel my pain."
"The clock never stops, never stops, never waits. We're growing old. It's getting late."
"Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone... than I ever have before."
"Next door, there's an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong."
"Everybody knows it hurts to grow up... and we're still fighting it."
"Everyone, when you're a teenager and you're growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it's not."
"Maybe this is wrong, but I feel like I craft my songs carefully enough that I still find that fifteen years after having written one, it still works for me - I'm not cringing."
"The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point."
"With the a cappella groups, every voice is like one string on a guitar, one note on the piano, or one cymbal, and you don't have the luxury of falling back on anything."
"I do have that mindset - that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath."
"But I really do have a soft spot for the solo shows. Any musician who writes and sings will tell you that's the center of it, that is it. It's almost like there's something church-like about it and you gotta go back there, if you're a songwriter that sings your material."
"The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don't want heard, then they have power over you."
"I'm not really a strange person or anything, so if there's music I like, usually there's other people who like it too."
"Why would I want to sound like Joni Mitchell? I've got Joni Mitchell records, and they're great, and I couldn't possibly be that good."
"Billy Joel and Joe Jackson were both great, and they both play piano."
"I'm really good at writing 'almost hits'."
"There is still some art in pop music. But it can't happen if you're not inspired."
"Even though I live in America more, I feel like when I go to Adelaide, that's when I get to go home."
"The press is like any business. It's a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster."
"I'm aware that I'm very fringe, and it's nice that way."
