Everyone always says, 'We don't want to be pigeonholed.' But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.

People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.

When Tupac came out, my writing changed for sure. I learned from it. It was a cultural thing.

There's never going to be a new Beatles because we don't consume things in that way anymore.

It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.

I can't really see myself writing about politics because I'm not really into it, and one of the worst things you can do is write about things you're not into.

You're always trying to make each record more autobiographical than the last one.

I'll probably continue to write about heartbreak forever. That stuff doesn't go away as you get older.

One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.

With 'Get Hurt,' we wanted to see where else we could go with the band. We thought it was time to change things up a bit. The song itself is similar to the feeling of a wreck you see coming, but long past the point you can avoid it.

I don't mean it egotistically, but I've been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it's part of my job and my duty - especially where I'm from - to speak the language of the people I'm around and speak for them.

There's no way I'm going to write for other people.

Gaslight has a specific way of playing and recording that's sort of become the way now.

Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.

Songs are like anything else - they dictate to you which ones go together and which ones don't.

There can be a wrong time - it's happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.

You can learn a lot if you become a student of what's happening to you.

Major labels have always been around our band since the beginning, and we just waited. We knew we had to do some things, and we needed to grow as a band before we made that step. We needed to do it our way and not do it how it works for other people.

We didn't invent this - this rock n' roll thing.

I never got a chance to do Tom Waits or PJ Harvey kind of stuff in the Gaslight Anthem.

The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that.

Fans look up to us, and that's creepy.

I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK.

For me, there's no point in being an artist and putting yourself out there if you're not going to really put yourself out there.