I always wanted to get into rock music so I could cover up my real personality, change my voice, and create a false self to hide behind.

When making a record, I could done a new face pretty easily and use all these different devices to hide who I am - or who I was - which really had very little to do with what I was trying to convey.

I tried to just do things like make some money, be responsible, help out other artists who I see have had a similar path.

Confidence was never in short supply in my case. If anything, I think I overshot the mark with confidence way too early in my career, and gradually, it's about just getting more humble and wanting to sit down more.

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.

I do enjoy my solo time ... I want to stay home and do soundtracks and watch TV in my underwear with a keyboard on my lap and just be a couch potato.

There's always room for improvement. I'm always focused on the results, and those are the precise things that I don't really experience as a part of the performance.