A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.
Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.
People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.
I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.
I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.
I know the Bible pretty well. I'm not one of those guys who can immediately start quoting every book, but usually I know where to look to find certain themes.
I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.
Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.
Songs are often character studies.
Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.
When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.
I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.
Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.
My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.
