John Popper

It's one of those things where, like, if you owe the IRS five grand, you've got to pay it back.

But if you owe them $750,000, you could probably cut a deal with them.

Exactly.

So you get that number up as high as you can, and you pay nickels on the dollar.

There was one point where I had to repeat junior year, and that's how I wound up meeting the rest of my band senior year.

Or I would have missed the whole Blues Traveler thing.

So it wound up being a career move.

Right.

And you're only allowed 18 absences annually.

in Princeton High School and I had like 150.

But because I was on the program, they classified me emotionally disturbed, which basically meant I got to kick it for the rest of the year.

Well, you know, I actually used a song to get out of my senior year English deficit.

How did you do that?

The space shuttle blew up senior year.

And they were asking us, you know, I was in English, and I wrote a song about it.

And the song was Ain't That Life.

Wow.

I'm 16, by the way.

Ain't that... I'm telling you about life.

I'm 16.