Tyler Joseph

Insecurity, for me, feels like the sensation of suffocating.

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.

You hear about our conservative background and know that we're Christian guys, but we're not timid at all. I will take anyone on when it comes to outworking them or putting on a better show or standing up for people who are being put down.

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.

Josh is the guy in the band who's just so friendly and super, wanting to walk up to you and say, 'Hey, I'm Josh. I drum in this band, and I'm a big fan of you, and I really appreciate what you do.' Josh has all these great friends in the industry now.

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

You have to give them something where they walk away and say, 'I want more of that.' To create something like that, you have to take them on a journey. So the live show is very important to us; we've been working on that a lot.

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.

I think one of the toughest things is that balancing act of trying to maintain relationships while being on the road.

I don't love the way I look. Nobody does, and if they do, I don't want to be that person's friend. But we all know what we're insecure about. The question I had as I was writing was, 'How are these things affecting the way I live? How am I compensating because I don't like this about myself? What do I do to cover it up?'

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.

It's a funny thing. I'll be in my home town of Columbus at a restaurant or something, and the waiter maybe asks, 'What do you do?' and I say, 'Oh, I'm in a band... Twenty One Pilots,' and he'll say, 'Cool, I'll check it out. I never heard of them.' And then I say, 'In September we're playing the Schottenstein Center,' and it's like, 'What?!'