Insecurity, for me, feels like the sensation of suffocating.
It's all right to fail. You just have to get up again and try. That's the bottom line.
A lot of things you do to cover up insecurities can be just as harmful to you as anything else.
We're constantly faced with decisions. A lot of times, the right ones take more work; it takes longer to see benefit: they're the long route.
I like candles. It helps cover up for the fact that I have four male roommates.
By the time you do what somebody else is doing, everybody has moved on to something else.
Blurryface is this character that I came up with that represents a certain level of insecurity.
When you write music that expresses doubt or concern, or talks about some of the darker things that a developing human goes through, people will come out of the woodwork to listen to someone else say it out loud.
There was a lot of pressure to find a genre and stick to it. People would tell me all the time, 'You can't be all things to everyone.' I would say, 'I'm not trying to be! I'm being what I want to be for myself.'
Music can connect people on an intimate level. What Josh and I are trying to do is represent anyone who has some of the questions that we have.
We do things differently. You don't have to worry about being part of a particular genre. You just go for it.
You hear about our conservative background and know that we're Christian guys, but we're not timid at all. I will take anyone on when it comes to outworking them or putting on a better show or standing up for people who are being put down.
I don't love the way I look. Nobody does, and if they do, I don't want to be that person's friend. But we all know what we're insecure about. The question I had as I was writing was, 'How are these things affecting the way I live? How am I compensating because I don't like this about myself? What do I do to cover it up?'
Our palette is wide and eclectic. That's why we crank out a lot of different styles. To some people, it makes us seem disjointed or scattered. But when we play live, it makes sense to us.
The lyrics are a lot about those big questions: why are we here, how did we get here, what's the point, and what's next. When those questions come up with fans, I would absolutely share with them what has helped me and where I stand on what it is that I believe.
Radio is a hungry monster that eats very fast.
From the beginning, my songwriting was from writing in a journal; it was completely unfiltered. I don't know if I really meant to show everyone this side of me, but when I saw how people resonated to the things I was saying, some of the questions I was asking, I realized I was not alone.
Our moms accuse us of selling out all the time, so we're still trying to cope with that. They claim to be true fans, like they've been there from the beginning, and they think that we've kind of, like, changed as humans.
We're past the self-doubt. We just have fun with it and just try to make the best music that we can make.
I've forgotten what it feels like to be in one place for more than a day... But we signed up for this. This is our dream. We sat down and said this is what we want to do, play music and touring.
