I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. I didn't take it all that seriously when I started. It was a little bit of a stigma to being a songwriter or a folkie back then. I did a lot of send-ups of sensitive singer-songwriter stuff when I was starting out, which limited my development as a songwriter in a way. I wasn't really fully given license to explore that until the mid-90s. I'm still working on it; I'm a little bit of a late bloomer.

Sometimes, I think the way the music business has been destructive and the way the fans are been put through it and try to navigate through it, so much is so foreign to what musicians would actually want to do or what would be natural to them.

Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows.

I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. I didn't take it all that seriously when I started. It was a little bit of a stigma to being a songwriter or a folkie back then. I did a lot of send-ups of sensitive singer-songwriter stuff when I was starting out, which limited my development as a songwriter in a way. I wasn't really fully given license to explore that until the mid-90s. I'm still working on it; I'm a little bit of a late bloomer.

Whether you're aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things.

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.

Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.