“The lyric of that chorus, “Damn, girl, you made me a criminal,” was about an experience with my son and Taylor Swift….I have a four-year-old son that is a huge Taylor Swift fan. As a rock guy, you want your son listening to Foo Fighters, stuff like that, but he just wasn’t into it. He wanted to listen to Taylor. And I was, like, “Oh, come on, man.” Then, when I’m not around my son and I’m driving, headed somewhere alone in the car, I find myself listening on my iPhone to Taylor Swift’s newest album. So it was like I was breaking the law that I set forth in some ways! But the rest of the song deals with how a lot of times a guy or a girl in a relationship feels like they do all the wrong things all because of how much they care about their significant other or sometimes their mistress or what have you. That’s really an overall theme with that song: handling that from that perspective. When writing the rest of the song, the subject matter of “Criminal” was about doing things that you know very well better than doing, and doing it all because this girl’s got you wrapped around her fingers.”Kenneth Nixon (149)

“That was about a past relationship gone awry. It’s about really putting yourself in a situation that’s [not – Ed] conducive to your health and overall well-being all for the point of making another person happy instead of yourself.”Kenneth Nixon (149)

“That song was at a point in my life when I lost a friend very close to me and the rest of the band. I just had a lot of questions. Growing up, my mom was raised in a Baptist church, so I was taught to believe these certain things, this certain mindset about things. I reached an age where I was like, “Well, it probably is better sometimes to question some things” – and not just always about religion. That song thematically was about that. After losing someone, I think a lot of people go through that. Even the most religious of people, when someone in their life passes away, it’s like, “How can you take that person if you’re such a loving god?” And that’s what that song is about: just being frustrated and angry with some divine power, if you will. And just wondering why that happened. You have questions: “If you’re really there, answer me.” That kind of thing.”Kenneth Nixon (149)