A Quote by Matt Berninger

I love to make songs out of some of those shadows - you know, some of the things you lie awake thinking about, social anxieties and romantic insecurities and all that stuff.
Music is an emotion and it makes you feel a certain way. Some songs make you want to dance, while some make you think. Some songs are positive, while some people see those songs as negative.
Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock'n'roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I've done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.
When you do have songs where you're going to say something, some kind of statement about cultural or social stuff, that in general people love it. People love to be challenged in that way.
Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.
When your hair is rising, that's when you know it's a good song - that's happened to me with some artists and some songs, John Lennon songs or when Nina Simone sings. It's great to make those moments yourself.
When you have a lot of time, when you're not working a full-time job, you have a lot of time to question things and think about things. Some of it's about romantic relationships, some of it's about drugs, about religion, about this mass of humanity traveling through life doing all this crazy stuff, not really knowing why or for what.
I just love to see the crowd reactions when I drop certain songs. There's some songs that you just know are going to pull out some serious emotions with people, and I love seeing that.
I'm not thinking about the next record really yet. I kind of want to do a bunch of stuff with Jonathan Zawada, the guy who did the album art. I'd like to do some crazy art installations and design some weird synthesizers and work with other people and make some fun stuff for a bit. Maybe tap into virtual reality stuff or maybe write another record.
Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better.
I have a huge span of fans, some who know all my radio songs and are familiar with my popular stuff and then some who have their own personal favorites. When I do my show, I try to take into consideration all those people.
Songs like 'Learn To Love Again' and 'Rochester' and some of the more gut-wrenching ones deal with the pain of the younger times of your life... trying to make sense of some the stuff we probably all went through.
Over the years, I've heard pop artists do some Christmas songs, and I haven't fully cared for them. They weren't the traditional Christmas music that I was raised on and love. Thinking of that, I wanted to make my songs mimic the classic Christmas songs.
And the thing about me is, I have a lot of mellow songs, because they're the easiest for me to write. I wanted to try to make some more upbeat songs, so, I ended up gravitating toward writing songs with friends, which was a great learning process, and also we came up with great songs. Those are the songs that came out the most naturally.
If you know anything about the issues in our country, you know we have a lot of deep-rooted anger and anxieties that spark a lot of passion. When you talk about our national anthem or the flag or race relations or the criminal justice system, it brings up a lot of those fears and insecurities.
Some of the songs are inspired by personal things that have happened. Others have been inspired by other people's stories, you know, like someone that witnesses something and so I tell the story through my own eyes. And some songs are just about how I feel about the world and others about the places that we have travelled to.
For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.
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