The music that I write is often not necessarily full of doom and gloom. You'll notice in most of the darkest songs, the music is actually pretty peaceful and lulling.

I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.

Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.

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.

I really believe there's more honesty in one live show than there may be in my whole output.

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

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