If your standards are low, you're going to stop pretty early on in the process.

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

Life is a series of problems to figure out how to solve gracefully and with dignity. That is what life is and I can't see it any other way.

At a major label you can start to feel that you're working for them, and that any work you do, you're never going to see any benefit.