Ryan Ross

“I always said as long as I had enough money to feed myself and have a place to eat then I'd be doing music.”

“A lot of people talk to me about writing lyrics and it is obvious they are really paying attention to the fact that ours are different from a lot of other bands.”

“Some people would say Counting Crows or Third Eye Blind would be a guilty pleasure, but they're two of my favorite bands - I'm not ashamed of it.”

“When I started playing music, all I was hearing was whatever was on the radio.”

“That's the funny thing - if there was a year and half or two years of us being a band like every other band and then getting signed, we would probably have made 'Pretty. Odd.' as our first album instead.”

“Brendon just likes to make a scene sometimes.”

“What we've realized is, for us to be happy for the long haul, we have to keep doing what we want to do, or else we won't want to play music with each other anymore.”

“We've got a younger fan base - and their parents. One day when we were at Abbey Road, an entire family was outside waiting for us - like, a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old, and their mother. They can agree on liking us for whatever reason. It's kind of strange.”

“Sometimes I'm not as open to loving.”

“I'd like to think that people see there's two ways to do things. You can put a lot of money into a band and force people to like them or you can just find good bands and people will like them anyway.”

“I know as far as I'm concerned, I'm getting really excited about writing, and I'm taking guitar and vocal lessons.”

“Brendon has always been a fan of pop music, but that's such a broad term, because I guess I would say I would be too, but in a different way.”

“That was something we were trying to figure out: Are we allowed to do a jazz song? Are we allowed to do cabaret? Just from hearing the Beatles, it was like, 'Well, they did it. It's okay to write something other than a standard rock song.'”

“I've seen those kids at the shows, I can hear them, and I can certainly tell the difference between one of our fans and a Fall Out Boy fan who's just there because they heard we were hot.”

“For a while there I wasn't sure that anybody cared about being the best at anything, and it's nice to have a group of guys that feel like we're doing it for the cause. Maybe we're just really young and naive for thinking music can matter, but it does to us.”

“We never set out to be this punk rock band that's going to stay small and tour in a van forever. We wanted to take our band to a level where we could do everything we want to do.”

“You don't realise how long three years is until you go away and write an album.”