Reactive arthritis is something I’ve been dealing with for nearly a year.

We met The Cult and were talking to them for a while. We went a few places with Offspring.

I never really paid attention to sales until the second record.

I am very scared of being outside my home for long periods of time.

I know if I don’t tour people will forget the record and you run a high risk of the record failing.

I’m lucky the arthritis happened at the time that it did because of the record.

Basically, the reason I’m vegan is because when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I began to understand that we don’t need to contribute to the killing and exploitation of animals to feed our bodies correctly.

None of us are really dumb and none of us are really smart. We’re in the middle.

The touring for this album was definitely going to be the most intense touring we’ve done.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

I try to stay positive by focusing on how much I’ll appreciate my health if I get better.

I have never had a social life, don’t ever want one because it’s boring. I’m just not very good with people, and you meet people every night who expect you to be this rock star with these developed social skills, which I don’t have.

We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.

I have not really experienced any significant conflict with anyone in regard to my choice to be vegan, although going out to eat is hard sometimes.

I wrote… Neon Ballroom in that time where I hated music, really everything about it, I hated it.

Kinda when I stopped eating was on our second album, just as it felt like everything was so out of control.

Though, since the first record, I’ve dramatically changed my expectations for our records.

We were perceived as a post-grunge band.

It just makes everything more pleasurable when you’ve got someone that emotionally is there to rely on.

I had to try and find a way to express happiness without sounding corny.

There was three or four years of my life where I hated myself and you know, would have quite happily ended it.

So I went and visited a doctor and he diagnosed me with reactive arthritis.

I am doing everything humanly possible to try and get well, but lately things have just kept getting worse.

I get very anxious and am scared in crowds and things like that.

There are no big groupie fans or anything.

When we first began and I was 14, my influences were the stuff that was in my parent’s record collection like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

It makes it hard to get over a certain period of your life when you are constantly revisiting it every night.

There’s an inherent thing in me where, if things are going too smooth, I’ll sabotage the hell out of them, just to make the music more of a sanctuary.

We were really motivated to do something with this record overseas, even though I hate touring.

Reactive arthritis is something I’ve been dealing with for nearly a year.

I start sweating and shaking and having panic attacks if I am not at home.

I have a theory because I was being beaten up a lot by people outside of school, it was almost like if I could make myself sick enough they’d take sympathy on me.

I’m always active in trying to educate people when it comes to eating animal products, testing on animals, and the health benefits of being vegan, although I’m probably not the best person to be talking about the latter at the moment.

Touring doesn’t kill me and I can handle it.

With our first two records we backed ourselves into a hole musically.