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.

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

As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.

There's a different physiology happening between the sound waves and the body that doesn't happen with music playing off the computer. About five years ago, I got a turntable that hooks up to your computer, and I put the vinyl in there and I listened to it back-to-back with a CD, and it didn't even compare. But people don't have time to go track down vinyl, lower it in, all that. And they probably don't care. It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know.

With modern recording techniques, and living in the Pro Tools era, the process gets really drawn-out, and it can become painstaking.

With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to.