Rather than missing home when I'm on tour, I miss tour when I'm at home.
I was part of a generation where kids had a lot of freedom and aimless downtime. I had no scheduled after-school activities. As long as you came home for dinner, everything was fine.
During the downtime on tour, I simply walk from room to room, staring into my computer.
Oh yeah, I don't eat a lot of candy on tour. When I get home, man, I love candy. Oh, man, and ice cream. I can't eat it on tour because of the sugar and my throat.
I haven't been reading anything on tour so far, I haven't had a minute. Any moment that I've had recently on the tour has been completely sleeping. But before I left home I was reading Dylan Thomas' book of collected works of poetry. I read a lot of poetry.
We tour, we do the distance from friends and family, not really knowing how to connect with people on the same level. I've understood now, as much as we tour, we live day-to-day, so our lives are much different than the people who stay at home and go home every night.
I grew up without a television, so when I went to L.A., it was sort of, you know, a lot to take in, but it actually suited me more than where I was from, so I sort of had that 'home away from home' feeling, and L.A. is definitely home now.
A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.
I don't really like living in a very small space, like a tour bus, even though I have an amazing tour bus, and I've had multiple tour buses. It's still not a lot of room.
I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that.
I don't have a lot of downtime.
This year, I had some downtime before my Australia tour and spent a week or so in Phuket, Thailand. As a confessed workaholic, sometimes it's good to unplug and detach and honestly, the scenery, the weather and the people truly made this an incredible place for me to recharge.
For us, if you're a rock band, there's no way around it. You have to tour. You have to tour a whole lot.
If you want a lot of endorsements then you'd pick the Olympics. But I've had a passion for the Tour since I was a kid. Let's put it this way: it would be harder to win a stage on the Tour de France so that would mean more. I'd take the Tour win first - but I'm aiming for both.
I have a lot of downtime in airports and on flights.
Australia's massive. I don't have a lot of downtime.