Benji Madden

“The songwriting process is different on every record because you're never coming from the same place when you're writing.”

“There's definitely a lot of moments in my life now where I go, 'Wow, I get paid for this.' I've had worse jobs.”

“We've made a lot of party music; we're definitely not Thom Yorke. But there's also depth to our records; we get emotional.”

“As a kid, you're like, 'Do they have Preakness everywhere or just in Maryland?' You hear people talking about it, and it was like, 'Oh, everyone goes there to hang out and party.' I didn't even know it was a race until I got older.”

“Jessie J's a funny, funny woman. What she does is she reels you in.”

“Good Charlotte's the first band we've ever been in, and back then, critics didn't matter. There were no rules. There was no one we had to impress.”

“Good Charlotte became more than a band and more than the songs: it became something that the fans owned.”

“It's hard to talk about childhood trauma. It's hard to talk about depression. It's hard to talk about anxiety. And we thought - I wonder if we just open up our subconscious and the things that we think about and hide from people every day and just let them come out in some of these lyrics.”

“I think that 'Prayers' is a really interesting one because we wrote it well before the border crisis was happening, and in that first verse, I was actually writing about the experience of me and my wife's relationship and finding someone who you feel safe with and you relate to and can ponder existence with.”

“There's this wave of new pop-punk bands that has come out that's bigger than ever. I'm really glad that we got to be a part of helping push that forward, if we did at all. I wouldn't have had it any other way.”

“I've done plenty of phoners for Joel when he's been too busy. You'll never know. Our voices sound so similar.”

“Every time we go to New Zealand, it gets harder to leave. Everyone's always treated us like we're at home.”

“A lot of time, I have to be the person who just goes, 'Hey dude, don't even trip. Don't worry about it.'”

“The American Dream - I believe in that cliche because I know what having nothing feels like.”

“I think about people whose lives maybe hadn't turned out as well as me and Joel's lives, and I just think it's just pure luck and the grace of God. I also think we were lucky to have each other as brothers.”

“'Nevermind' by Nirvana. That was a big one for me.”

“Good Charlotte is very special to us. It's something we really cherish.”

“We can guarantee you that 15 to 30 seconds of any of our songs are going to be good. The rest, we can't guarantee.”

“The youth is always going to decide the future.”

“That's just the music industry. They always want you to write something like the one that was popular.”