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.

I have for four years now been ringing the bell. Economic Holocaust is coming. Economic day of reckoning is coming.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

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.

When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.

You spend so many months and years in the studio, and you see the clock ticking and so much time spent on the minutiae of technical things. And I just thought it'd be fun to do something extremely fast and get that rush of something that had some energy, something that you weren't tired of when you finished it.

When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.