Tyler Joseph

Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I've kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I'm looking for to complete a song.

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.

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.

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.

It is true that if you hear our music described, it sounds unappealing. I used to laugh and agree with people when they said it didn't make any sense.

If I were to give advice to someone that just started a band and how to get someone's attention, you've gotta have a central hub. For us, it was Columbus, Ohio.

Even though there's only two guys in the band, when both of us are on the same page about something, you can't really change our minds.

Self-awareness is a character trait that's horrible to have if you're a performer. I think that a lot of these performers that we see get up on stage and play music, there's a sense of them truly not caring how they're coming across. They are just themselves. I look up to a lot of people who are like that.

One think that you notice about anyone that gets up on stage is that they don't really have a lot of self-awareness. It's kind of a trait that performers don't have because you just kinda just have to let go and do whatever you want to do on stage.

When you write music that expresses doubt or concern, or talks about some of the darker things that a developing human goes through, people will come out of the woodwork to listen to someone else say it out loud.

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

I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they'd retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.