Lyrically, I think I'm frustrated with this whole process of trying to figure out what I believe about the world and life. I don't like to adopt a sort of guiding philosophy.
I'm real happy. I've been lucky in love, and I've got a wonderful kid now, and things have been going well.
The love you have for your kids is so overwhelmingly powerful that it alters your perspective. The dark things going on in the world become very poignant and vivid.
I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.
I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
I tend to write a pretty half and half split of, like, slow, morose things and then sort of more upbeat stuff.
I don't like the idea of a singer-songwriter record. I don't picture myself that way, and it's not my favorite sort of look, I guess. It's really just an aesthetic thing.
My attempt at really doing classic sort of songwriting is Shins stuff.
We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of 'New Slang,' the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.
There's not a lot of thinking that I need to do away from the studio on Broken Bells stuff.
I was a regular dork. I was a kid who was scrawny and all that, and probably kind of dumb or something. I wasn't unordinary; I wasn't extraordinary.
Horrible dates are when you're with people who are immature and can't really be comfortable in their own skin.
The thing that inspires me most is empathizing with people's flaws and seeing how they deal with them. That sort of connection you feel with someone when you realize that maybe even the negative things that they've said or done are because of insecur...
I'm trying to avoid having regrets about missing opportunities. That would be the worst thing. Like having an audience waiting, and not working hard enough, and coming out with a record that disappointed them.
I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.
Until having kids, I had never really thought about mortality so much.
There is pressure that comes with everything being a big deal. I remember thinking, 'I need to survive the Shins. I don't know what I'm going to do to make a living otherwise, but I really don't want to do the Shins right now.'
I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.
I remember being in high school, and you had to draw those lines and define yourself. I don't think when I was in high school I would have been willing to admit that I liked the Shins. I was into TSOL and Black Flag. I probably would have listened to...
The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
The way I was brought up, there was a little bit of prodding to do something more practical, and I wasted a lot of time trying to be a practical person.
