There's always that struggle between me wanting to keep [song] new and fresh and then be - I can never get with pop songs being so repetitive.

Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.

I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.

The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.

You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

There's kind of this unequaled thrill of playing a half-finished song, it's kind of sense of slight embarrassment; like you're blushing. I like doing that. I did that with "Eyeoneye" and it was almost a curse on the song for a while; I debuted it when it was half-finished in a very public way