Did that pose a problem when Dashboard reunited: “O.K., we’re ready as a band. The fans are ready. But, is the thing ready?”

Yes, and it wasn’t. If you were to have been my accountant at that time, you would say there might never be a better time than right this minute to release a record, but it just doesn’t work for me that way. So the waiting game began. We did our tour and a year passed. I wrote, like, snippets and then I would stop. I’d physically stop. I put the pencil and the paper down and said, “Stop it. You’re just eager, you’re eager to deliver.”

Then one day off tour I woke up one morning and I walked downstairs and I wrote a song, and it was evident from the first melodic idea that this was a Dashboard song. And the next morning I woke up and I bolted for my guitar. I realized, “I’m there.” After all that time I’d begun to wonder if they’d ever come back, and when they came back they came back in rapid succession. The whole thing was a cavalcade and I just surrendered to it.

If they hadn’t come and you just continued playing your back catalog in amphitheaters, would you have felt that something was missing?

No. I had decided that the worst thing that could happen was that I write an album that would hurt the legacy of the albums I’d made already. But now that I have this record, I can say it’s because I’ve gotten in touch with that place again and there was more to be found there and I’m willing to risk the whole legacy because it came from the same place.