Tyler Joseph

“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.'”

“There are times when we look back and think, 'Do you remember when we had to lug a piano downstairs to a basement of some venue to play for five people?' We do a lot of reminiscing. It helps us keep our heads on straight.”

“It doesn't matter what we post about ourselves on social networks or how many times we play live TV, even. It's all about those people, those fans who are telling other people about us.”

“There's so many people who have never heard of us, but I think what we've learned is you can't underestimate the power of a core fan base and people who believe what you're doing. I think they're the ultimate marketers. They're the ones promoting us.”

“We just want to outdo ourselves every time we come back somewhere.”

“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 do things differently. You don't have to worry about being part of a particular genre. You just go for it.”

“Live shows have been going on for so long, can you really do something that's never been done before?”

“There's been many times when a producer will say, 'I don't think you want to say that.' We were told we shouldn't be so brutally honest about songwriting or radio or the industry.”

“Radio is a hungry monster that eats very fast.”

“You kind of have to celebrate the moment that you get to create something that you love that falls into the parameters of a 3-minute-and-20-second song, to try to be creative inside of those parameters.”

“By the time you do what somebody else is doing, everybody has moved on to something else.”

“Here in Ohio, the hardcore scene is a big thing, so some of our good friends are in hardcore bands. So we've had to figure out how the heck we get these people to respect us.”

“For us, we make a song, and if we like it, it goes on a record.”

“We've done that whole spectrum of different varieties of shows, and we've figured out the best way of capturing the audience and taking them to a place where they will have an experience that they will never forget, whether they don't like it, or they actually resonate with what we're trying to do.”

“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.”

“Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they're not there right now. They're performing, but it's muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.”

“When you play a show or festival, people know what they're getting; they want it. Then you're thrown onto a show where people are watching TV in their houses, and whether they ask for it or not, we're being played in front of them. There's a lot of negative feedback.”

“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.”

“For a long time, we just played here - Columbus is a perfect place to work your way up and maybe build a fan base.”