And that [realization] comes with age and maturity.
Whatever it is, it was definitely…It was a challenge. It’s a lot harder to play less. And that’s kind of a lesson I feel like we all learned in the band on this round. When you’re doing things in band practice and then you’re recording your band practice and listening back, you start to realize, like, “Why am I filling up that hole?” Letting the music breathe and keeping your arrangement wide open feels so good. I think in that sense, we really focused more on the vocal almost than anything. It was really about what arrangement propped up the lyrics.

I wrote down “Hostage” in my notes as one of the songs that I think is the most adult song you’ve ever written. [Laughs.] The voice especially on that one, it’s just like, “Wow, kids are really going to notice a difference.” It’s so—I hate using the word “mature,” because it makes it sound so boring, but that stood out to me. The song reminded me of Bruce Hornsby—and that’s not a bad thing at all.
There’s definitely a little nod to Hornsby in that one. When I first started playing piano, Hornsby was huge. I think I was like, nine, and those tunes were coming out on the radio. That’s kind of what I was listening to, or one of the things I was listening to [then]. And I don’t know how it happened, or why it happened, but somewhere along the way, a lot of these influences that had been a huge part of my upbringing started manifesting themselves within the songs and within the arrangements. I can only attribute that to [how] we were approaching the recording process very similarly to how guys in that era of recording would have. I think some of those classic influences just started coming to light with the people I had around me in the studio. But there certainly was a moment part way through the record where I was like, “Wow, this kind of reminds me of a lot of these records that I spent so much time dissecting and internalizing as a kid.”

I can see that. The riff of “Television” reminds me of U2, and “Release Me” is so ‘80s power-pop rock radio. It’s like Foreigner or something.
I’ve heard that before. That’s the thing: I think there was a freedom to experiment and express ourselves differently than I had in the past, because it was really about this congealing of a sound and a band rather than micromanaging every note on a record. So in I think in that sense we’ve—I hope at least—a lot of the stuff came across as a classic sound.

You were co-writing some songs with Matt [Thiessen] from Relient K. Which of those made the record?
It’s “Platform Fire,” “People, Running” and “Amy, I.”

It’s such an interesting shift these days: So many fans are almost upset when their favorite artists use co-writers. Like, it’s not the same as it coming from their brain. Is that something you were worried or concerned about?
Well, I think I kind of held that opinion for a lot of years myself. Not necessarily of other artists, but of my own art. I thought, “Well, if I’m exploring this territory with another human being, then it’s not 100 percent me.” Again, as you get older and write lots of songs, and you record lots of music, it’s very easy to become stagnant. It’s very easy to not push forward and think differently and stretch yourself, and that was really the name of the game on this record. I had named the record before most of these songs were written, and I was like, “This record is about a universal perspective on this moment in my life, and my friends and the people around me.” And I started writing music with other people before I started working on this record. I had done a track with Will [Beckett] from The Academy Is… That was one of the first things I had ever written with anybody else. And I loved it.

And then I have these friends of mine who were working on records, and they would ask me to come in and co-write with them. I found it to be such a stimulating process. I don’t really know how else to explain it. It’s just the idea of, “You can sit in your room and beat your head against the wall and work on a song,” which, of course, I did on the majority of this record. But you can also have this other experience, which is so beautiful, where you’re in a room with somebody you’re close with and you have a conversation about something real. It’s not like I called Diane Warren or Kara DioGuardi to write a song on the record. You know what I mean? These were guys who I had kind of come up with who were friends, who are in similar places in their lives. We got together and as friends had conversations about serious topics and wrote about them.

If somebody has a problem with that, then that’s completely their right to do so, but for me I think it really pushed my songwriting. I think if you listen to those songs, they’re some of the better songs on the record. I think they are, because there was a spirit and an energy and a vibe. My wife walked by when Matt and I were writing “Platform Fire,” and we were downstairs in my house in L.A. We sat down for dinner afterwards, and she was like, “It was awesome to hear you guys, because you sounded like a couple of kids playing when they’re five years old playing with their trucks in the living room or something.” We were giddy, we had a blast.

I think a lot of times the co-writes are imposed upon people, it’s more like, “You need to write a hit single.” What you’re describing is just more like pals hanging out, bouncing ideas off each other like a brainstorming session.
People who know me—and the fans who know me well—they know that I try and build a spirit of brotherhood when we’re on the road at all humanly possible. I try to take bands out with me that I believe in and that I want to succeed, and I try and open up for bands that feel the same way about my band. I don’t like to be on tours where it’s not a friendly environment, and I don’t like to be in a studio when it’s not that. So, I think for a record called People And Things, to kind of get some other perspective and build that into what I’m doing, is great. Granted, most of the songs that were co-written on this record, which was four of them, they came from ideas that were spawned in my head and then developed in conversations with other friends. It’s not like we went in and were like, “Okay, well we could be sending this song over to a Swedish pop band.” [Laughs.] It was less about singles and more about, “How do we dig deeper and become better songwriters?” You know, I really cherish the experience and probably will do a lot more of it. alt