Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

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.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.

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.