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

I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced.

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.

I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.

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.