Our lives went off in different tangents when the band broke up, and there was a sense of wanting to move forward,

I was so broke. I was just trying to keep it going, keep the band going and writing all the time. ... I had written myself into oblivion, ... I had gotten to a point that I was very proud of and that I thought had depth, but no one wanted to hear that.

Anybody can be going from being broke to being wealthy, as I did.

When I got here, there was a sense of futility. If the old administration had stayed on here for three more years, I think football would have been dropped. We would have no marching band, and we'd be at about 12,000 students today.

When you first become an EMT, you are extremely gung-ho, with a sense that you save lives, ... You are the antidote to all of life's miseries. You make people rise from the dead. But when you are an EMT for a length of time, you come to the grim reality that the number of lives that you actually save are small. You stabilize people until they get to the hospital. You make sure they can breathe and don't bleed to death and nothing more.

We've been wanting to do it for a while, we talked about it more seriously after Peter passed away.