Sublime

How about the way that you answer the phone when somebody calls you? Is that your signature? Is that a song? I like the idea of giving ourselves permission to knock down a lot of intellectual barriers and rhetorical cages when we think about songwriting.

1. When progressing from shape X to shape Y, the first finger shifts up one fret.

“ECM sound.”

All these thoughts, all these ideas, coalesced into what may have been our most consistent record since Things Fall Apart. It was so unified in its message, in fact, that one of the songs we thought would be the lead single, a track called “Birthday Girl” with Patrick Stump as a guest vocalist, had to be taken off the record. It was a topical song,

motto—“the most beautiful sound next to silence”—