As you grow older, you want to learn, you want to change, you want to evolve and you don't want to live in fear. Fear is the mind killer.
I'm still like a little kid about it, where I'm just so happy and excited that people want to come to our shows and watch us play. I still go outside the venues and take a picture of our name on the marquees. I still feel like I'm trying hard to be in a good band, I really do. And I think that's a healthy approach.
Playing '10,000 Days' in concert was very challenging but infinitely rewarding. It's much more sensitive and emotional than our other songs, and it requires pacing yourself and also being very vulnerable.
I was living in London with my brother, and he was a friend of Matt Marshall, who signed Tool. So we were the first people over in Europe to get the first Tool demo in 1991, and me and my brother immediately cottoned on to it.
We lock ourselves away and we concentrate on what we're doing and try not to think about the madness that's surrounding it, and all the hype.
The last thing I do is go and listen to heavy rock music. But I love electronic music. The purity of the tones is inspiring, because it's obviously much more controlled than a guitar tone.
Writing is a grueling process for us, and once we finish an album, we go on tour for a couple of years. Plus, we're always very involved in our own business, so we need a break when we come back.
Everyone knows we take our time. We're really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven't been discovered before. It's kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.
Maybe you have a particular type of sound you want to go for, but if you really want to be original, there's no real recipe for that. For me it's just about letting it come to you... if you can let your head clear out, then almost anything is available.
In the end, our way of writing music is a long process of experimentation. We enjoy the luxury of taking this very seriously and giving it the time that it needs.
We don't ever write stuff individually and say, 'OK, this is gonna be the song.' We bring in ideas in their rawest form and bounce them around to find the thing that is bigger than any individual's idea.
I used to aspire to being more of a traditional bass player, to be honest. People say I play it like a guitar - and I was a guitar player when I was growing up. I started learning when I was eight, and that's what I was fascinated with in my teen years.
It's not like people are going to be reading about us every day in the magazines.