I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.
I see a skill developing of writing about not just feelings that I'm feeling, but things that I deeply care about as well.
I'm involved in a lot of different things, like producing, starting a label and writing songs. But still my biggest release, and the easiest and most fun thing for me to do in my life, is to be in New Found Glory, go on stage and play these songs.
I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.
I've written a lot of songs in the last couple years, but writing a lot of songs doesn't always mean writing good songs.
Games are quite shy at talking about different things. Most are about facing hordes of monsters or saving the world or whatever; few games actually talk about the real world, about real people, about their relationship, their emotions, their feelings.
The things that affect you most deeply - the things that will destroy you if you don't sing about them - are the things that you often end up singing about. It's really just about saying those things that everybody thinks but no one will say and making a connection by uncovering these diamonds that are inside of all of us that no one wants to tell each other about.
Actually, I never tell for whom my songs are written. It's a kind of superstition! I started writing songs for not having the courage to say certain things in people's faces and started to put these feelings on paper... Over the years, became a mania and then I never talk about for whom they are made.
Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.
You do see more people that have been freed up over the last couple of hundred years to do work that is more about thinking about or creating things... and I would hope to see that trend continue.
We've always been a band who's taken forever to do things. After writing 'Persona' I think we wrote about four songs in three years!
The way to start writing isn't by writing at all. But by living. It isn't about creating something from thin air, but about documenting our personal feelings about the things that we see. Or to put it crudely, how are you going to be a storyteller if you have no story to tell? Perhaps, in the end, there are no such things as creative people; they are only sharp observers with sensitive hearts.
At the beginning of my career, I saw an opportunity to forge new ground and focus on songwriting. Not many people were doing that at the time. Pretty much nobody. I thought I could write some really cool songs that would rise above all these dozens of genres that exist within dance music. I'd make it more about the songs. For the last 20 years, I've been sharing stories of my life through music. I've been writing songs about my life.
The biggest thing this has in common with almost all of our records is the dualities are still there. We kind of stripped down the other things we were writing about, and that's what was left. A lot of good things have happened to us in the last couple of years both as a band and in our personal lives. But something as wonderful as having children also brings along these new fears and terrors and responsibilities.
'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.
I found in my writing that I could express emotions that, as an everyday person, I have no interest in expressing: these strange things that girls talk about called feelings.
Because I'm a Christian, when I write things are going to have a certain flavor. When you're writing songs you try to be careful. You make sure there are no conflicts with what you believe, especially when you've been real vocal about being a Christian.