The upside to smoking is that you get to be social. I was looking for a light when I bumped into Ben Harper's manager. A couple of days later, Ben and I were in the studio.

The husk could be some useless bloke or losing myself and changing my DNA with bottomless grief.

I'm not comfortable holidaying in other people's poverty.

We're all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn't it?

I was scared of the Bible - it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus's disciples and I used to show them modern life - how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn't change my feelings about the Bible jinx.

Kissing was something I did a lot of. Kissing in a wheat field as the sun begins to set on a summer's evening, with the haze of that light.

To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.