#54—Right arm. This is Jason Gideon, the like, main detective from that TV show Criminal Minds. I forget the name of the actor who plays him—he was only on the show for like, two or three seasons—but I just always felt a deep connection to this guy. When we were touring with the first album, I was just watching a TON of that show on the bus, and I would always see that character and think like: This is how a person’s supposed to be. LOL. This is a man. And there’s this amazing thing that they do at the end of every episode where like, they have the crew coming back from catching a serial killer or solving a murder or whatever, and they’re just riding the private jet back to the FBI headquarters, and for the first time all episode, you see them super-relaxed, like, actually getting to talk to each other and hang out and be themselves, because they know, like, as long as they’re up in the air, as long as they’re above civilization, all that danger, all that stress in the world can’t touch them. And that just really reminded me of what it’s like in the jet with me and Curt and Patrick and Mo, you know? Up in the air and out in the middle of the ocean—those are the two places where we can really chill and be ourselves. Between the two, though, the air is better, because I’ve seen paparazzi people just pop out of the fucking surface of the water, like, in a submarine or some shit, trying to take pictures of me on the yacht. Seriously! I’ve seen them do it! But unless they’re fucking military trained, I doubt they’ll be able to fly alongside us and board our plane.

#49—Left wrist. I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble for this one. I guess because it’s in Arabic? Like, I guess there are a lot of people in the world who are like: Why would you have that language on your body? Why would you support that language? And it’s like: You realize it’s a language, right? You realize it’s just WORDS? I remember right after I got it and posted a picture of it, everyone was freaking out being like: WHAT DOES IT MEAN? WHAT DOES IT SAY? WHAT KIND OF HIDDEN MESSAGE IS THIS? And people were coming up with all these crazy theories. And then finally this dude from Syria just wrote in the comments, like: All it says is “Love & Justice,” people. Chill.

I got it as a tribute to Mandy. Not in a lovey-dovey way, but like, just as a tribute to what she was going through and what she was doing. I wanted to find a way that I could support her, you know? Show her that I had her back.

After we got back from France, like, while I was doing all the Roses and Mud shit and gearing up to tour with Chris and Trick, Mandy was definitely in a better place about what had happened in Berlin than she was like, in the days immediately following the attacks, but she still wasn’t “over it,” and she still wasn’t resolved in her mind about what had happened or why it had happened, and so I think she started to go really deep into all of the various explanations she could find.