Quotes from Ryan Ross

We wanted to grow, and we were really over the circus theme at that point. We went out in the woods and got new clothes and all grew beards.

Whenever I'd go anywhere with my dad - in his 1980 burgundy Dodge Ram - he'd always listen to mix tapes of country-music stars like Garth Brooks, Clint Black and Willie Nelson. Those were the first songs I ever learned the words to.

I don't understand why Brandon Flowers keeps taking shots at us. Maybe he feels threatened, but he seems to be doing just fine on his own. It's pretty dumb. I mean, we're from the same town, and we've never met him.

We were in this park in Canada throwing a frisbee around, and there was a homeless guy there who swore to God I was Mick Jagger. I kept telling him I wasn't, and he kept thinking I was Jagger and wanted to play frisbee with us. Then he heard a siren coming and thought I called the cops - and he ran away!

When I was about six, I was kind of a cowboy. I'd dress up in boots, straps, hat and bandanna, and my dad would take us to the rodeo.

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.

Even when we were stuck touring, earning $100 a day, I never thought I'd even make it that far.

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.

Don't get me wrong, The Beatles are one of our all-time favourite bands, but there's a lot more we were influenced by.

In Japan, the way they act at shows is very different from home because they don't yell, they clap for about 10 seconds after the song and then it's completely silent.

I'd never really travelled before, and when we started going places, like Japan, France, Germany and all over Europe, it's been interesting to see how different cultures work. But to be there playing music makes it so much better.

And my biggest revelation that will never be beaten is the Beatles. I couldn't believe that I'd gone my whole life without knowing all those songs.

To be honest, the search for a label was really weird, because some of the labels that you wouldn't expect to care about stuff like radio formats were the ones that did care. They were like, 'Yeah, we love this record, but what are we going to play on the radio?' And I was like, 'You don't have bands on the radio.'

It's kind of disappointing and disgusting in a way, how some people are focusing on how we look.

I think that everybody kind of changes a lot between the time they're seventeen and when they're twenty-one or twenty-two.

We got really excited by Motown and early '60s soul music that was fun sounding.

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.

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 noticed that things aren't bad all the time. So I've tried to write songs that people will want to hear when they're getting off work rather than something that's going to bring them down.

People have taken technology so far, to the point where music is almost sterile these days.

Most songs on the radio are so straightforward and it just doesn't open up people's minds.

Some aspects of the fame are annoying, but at the end of the day it's something we're most grateful for. It's certainly opened the door to a whole new batch of opportunities.

I just couldn't keep on trying to please people. It was hindering my creative output, and I had to be honest with myself.

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.