All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I'd go back to Virginia.

Give me something to assemble, I won't look at the directions, I'll try to figure it out by myself. It's why I love Ikea furniture.

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of school.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn't see any rock & roll bands.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

I'm so not macho. It's crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

It's funny; recently I've started to notice people's impersonations of me, and it's basically like a hyperactive child.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America - land of the free, home of the brave.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it's just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

No, there's something about the sing-song cadence of children's music that has its place in rock.

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

Cause when you're sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

I dropped out of high school and I couldn't go to college 'cause I wasn't smart enough, so I'd resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.

It's a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that's a good thing.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

I had never been in charge of anything. I'd always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I'd never been in charge of an organization.

It's tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I'm wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.