I've spent most of my life living in cities where people are obsessed with looking down on people from everywhere else. You get so used to doing it that you start to believe it's simply what everyone does. It makes for an atmosphere of unwelcome that penetrates much of our modern life. It's a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.

You want to embrace, but I can't figure out how to hold on to it.

I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.

If you've never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame.

I think I'd been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time.

A long December and there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

When you're young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There's a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.