It does feel really good to sing songs about somebody that I really respect, admire, love, care about and am so passionately attracted to after all this time.

My mother, father and brothers (I was the youngest of three boys), were all very sarcastic and we were a complete Irish-Catholic family. We didn't talk about our feelings ever, and if we did, we were yelling about them - there was no in-between. That's just carried over so many ways in my life and sabotaged relationships, sabotaged creative stuff.

When you write a song you're more or less saying, "This is everyone. I think this is everyone." It doesn't necessarily have to be this thing where I go out and I'm like candy-striping, or becoming a therapist or something. I think that maybe, maybe I'm supposed to [be a musician], because of that fact.

I can't imagine anybody in my life I've been more vulnerable with than my wife.

For me, making music in general is a therapeutic process. It began as a way for me to meet friends, and when you're a kid just screaming your face off, you're processing anger; you're processing all the things that happened to you, whether it's mistrust or confusion, whether you've gone through abuse.

If you start getting yourself into just doing stuff for the money, even if it's a desperate situation, I just firmly believe that if you stick it out through that, then something right will come down the path.

They say what doesn't kill the soul will make you stronger, but you can't be a stone-hearted man.