ALEX EBERT

To be lost is as legitimate a part of your process as being found.

There are many examples of great songs that become more famous when they are covered.

It took me a long time to be alright with smiling onstage.

Popular music usually has a chorus that needs to repeat, and people need to remember the song. That's sort of the major guideline when you're writing a song.

I've always been around musicians and always been the songwriter who doesn't end up playing the music.

Hip hop was definitely, far and away, the primary influence for at least 10 years of my life. From about 7 or 8 on till about 15 or 16, that's all I listened to.

I took a lot of long summer road trips with my dad, and the mix of music we listened to on the road skipped around from classical to Western to new age to hyper-cinematic.

For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'

I pay attention when the Academy Awards come around. I haven't watched them in a while, but I used to watch them religiously when I was a kid.

Pro Tools was invented to quicken the recording process.

I try to give the music more of a campfire feel as opposed to a library atmosphere. I like when you can hear people hanging out in the songs and doing a little shuffling. It creates a feeling of participation.

I think Edward Sharpe's music is counter-cultural music in the strangest sense where you have a time now where love, optimism, hope and community are uncool and not part of the mainstream culture.

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.

At its best, a live show is completely transcendent. The image I get is breaking through glass or shooting out into the free zone.

Berlin would be a great place to have no cell phone, I think. Especially if you were able to live in a central location.

In a place like the Greek Theater in L.A., to try and create a close connection with the audience seems almost antithetical to the architecture of the building.

The album is a thing that you can hang out with between shows. I think that it's really nice to give people something they can enjoy in a private situation or walking around, just as the soundtrack of their lives.

It's not that I want to necessarily avoid my darker moments, but I don't capitalize them and put a crown on them and tote them around as the answer anymore.

Heath Ledger was supposed to put our album on what would have been a new record label. I still feel a little dead after losing him.

For me, it's very childish to tour on a train. And I think that's a powerful quality, to inspire childishness.

I think that when you're open, you're at your most powerful.

Physical pain is problematic because it's very difficult to transcend that. Sometimes you're just in physical pain, and that's a bummer. Even then, there are beautiful things involved in the healing of that. I've experienced some.

My pain is usually caused by some sort of attack on my ego. So usually, pain is an indication of something that, eventually, I'm going to want to transcend. But sometimes pain is just pain that you sit through. I find it can have a really exhilarating effect.

Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.

Sometimes, I have to really monitor myself, but the only monitoring job I really do on myself on stage is, Is this truthful? Is this truthful? Is this truthful? Ideally, I send it in a flow of truth.