I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.

[Early on,] the attitude was that what I was doing wasn't music.

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

Back then, Pro Tools only had four or eight tracks, so we couldn't actually hear all the tracks. We could only hear eight at a time, so if a song had 25 or 30 tracks, we wouldn't be able to hear it until we went into the studio an put it all on tape. The process was a little bit backwards.

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.

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.

There's an infinite amount of possibilities and detours and things that can distract you from actually just performing the song and having whatever emotion that's invested into the song come through in the recording.