There's so much chaos in life, I think I make music to make things feel calm and sane, to define something, to bring some meaning into it - it's a real peaceful thing to me.
I'm somewhere between a gumshoe and a journalist. A writer, not a symbol.
When I write a song, it is to fill a niche in people's lives. To have a song for every experience if one hadn't been written yet.
Writing songs was like my ticket to the world, I think.
At midnight every night, I would methodically leave the house for a couple hours' walk, come back in, and record. And then the sun came up. If I had done something good, then I'd be happy and go to sleep.
I cross things out more than I write them. And if I try to sing a line, and I know that it's written incorrectly, I get this weird sort of physical nausea, and my mouth curls up all strange. I guess that's why I always write the words first: because, if everything feels okay, I'm ready to put it to music.
I've never detected a correlation between where I am and what I write. I think there could be something subconscious, though. And I can't really speak for my subconscious.
I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.
Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.
I didn't think I'd ever eat pork; it just does not appeal to me.
Music is a social act.
There are a million tiny weird towns. You never know what you're going to get into if you drive an hour into the wild.
James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.
I'm not really a child of this '120 TV channels, a billion websites' era. I tried to live that for a long time but recently realized I don't get anything from it. I told myself it was luxury, but it was really only annoying. I'd rather just watch the same 50 movies over and over.
