The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.

You tour and you work hard and you take care of your fans and very real things lead to other real things. There's never been some fantastic fluke or break in my career, it has all been very slow and steady.

One thing about being a performer is you're not just doing an intellectual job behind a desk; you're out there performing and being looked at, being assessed for really superficial stuff.

If you're going to make work and you're going to write and you're going to put yourself out there and perform, you will be belittled, you will be insulted, you will be called a standard collection of names, you will be accused, and you just have to stand there and continue to work and find a way to not let those things poison you.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?

The key is to just focus on the spots where the love is real, because you can just drive yourself crazy focusing on the negativity, focusing on the relationships that are irreparable and just aren't going to work, trying to convince the haters that you are indeed lovable. So much of that is wasted energy.

You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.