Musician

We're constantly faced with decisions. A lot of times, the right ones take more work; it takes longer to see benefit: they're the long route.

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.'

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?!'

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.

Growing up, money is important. And now I have a career where I'm making enough money to live. But I really want to give it to my parents, my family, charities, and people around me.

Our palette is wide and eclectic. That's why we crank out a lot of different styles. To some people, it makes us seem disjointed or scattered. But when we play live, it makes sense to us.

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're not the first people to climb up something or do a backflip during a set, but we want to do something that gets people's attention.

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.

We had so many friends who did the band thing, and one of their first moves was to go on tour, and they'd just blow all their money.

I think throughout the day; there are always lines or certain words, and I'll just keep notes in my phone. It might just be one or two words, and then that could inspire a whole song, lyrically.

I always wrote with some kind of angle of ignorance. I didn't know what was right or wrong.

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.

A lot of bands have an unfortunate past; we've dodged a lot of bullets when it comes to that.

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.

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.

Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.

Even if it's a horrible venue - a bar that barely has a PA and no lighting - we're still there trying to get somebody to not forget us.

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.

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.