I'm three years into my recovery from heroin and all this stuff and I want to be able to help people. But they have to do it on their own.

When you write a song you're more or less saying, This is everyone. I think this is everyone. It doesn't necessarily have to be this thing where I go out and I'm like candy-striping, or becoming a therapist or something. I think that maybe, maybe I'm supposed to [be a musician], because of that fact.

If you do the right thing, the right thing will come down the path.

For a really long time, I've been trying to find balance where I can talk about my feelings and be upfront with people, confront issues and not have to beat them to death or ignore them.

I got really lucky when I found somebody that I want to be friends with forever.

As far as keeping my sanity, it's something I've only recently tried to focus on as a means of self-preservation.

My mother, father and brothers (I was the youngest of three boys), were all very sarcastic and we were a complete Irish-Catholic family. We didn't talk about our feelings ever, and if we did, we were yelling about them - there was no in-between. That's just carried over so many ways in my life and sabotaged relationships, sabotaged creative stuff.

I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.

It does feel really good to sing songs about somebody that I really respect, admire, love, care about and am so passionately attracted to after all this time.