I was like the roadie, I was carrying gear, checking things in at airports, making sure they had flowers backstage and interfacing with promoters who were sometimes really nice and sometimes a little seedy. It was a great apprenticeship, to be in the music industry.

What I did with my first records was, my writing process was that I didn't touch any instruments to write it, so I was making it all on the computer, and really the arrangements were coming first, the intricate thing.

I know that, physically, I'm a very demure-looking person. But I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow. I'm lucky that I get to play music, and that it's not going to come out in some totally destructive way.

For a brief moment, I considered deconstructing the song and going down a cerebral road, but then I realized it would kill what is most powerful about it.

I have a phobia of checking voicemail. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and everything is, like, you're gonna get kidnapped, or somebody's gonna die, or killer bees are going to take you out. I'm a very anxious person.

Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.

I have a lot of guitar heroes I guess, some of them are female and some of them are male. Robert Fripp is one of them, and Marc Ribot, that's another guitar hero.