Being a songwriter or a painter you're definitely facing your fears. You're facing your fears because you're speaking your truth; you're speaking from your heart. That's something that's not easy to do, you set yourself up for all sorts of criticism or vulnerability but that's why we do it.

When you get to say something in a song you're not directing it necessarily at one person. When it's in a song it's easier to get it out. I don't really worry so much about it when I'm writing a song.

Songs don't really feel like me unless I somehow shed a little secret or open myself somehow or be vulnerable. When I'm singing these songs, it feels like me, and that comes with the vulnerabilities and the strengths and the moments of triumph or whatever.

I guess it's just my job to somehow balance knowing that every song is going to come differently and be different, but also know that, on the other hand, I am a songwriter and I am a craftsman, and I do have a craft and a technique and a method. So I need to balance the technique and the method.

Every song is completely different. Sometimes they come like a lump of clay and it's your job to chip away and find out what's in the center. Sometimes it comes like swimming fish, and you have to follow it and see where it leads. Sometimes it comes totally fragmented.

I can write songs, but I'm not gonna really feel good about the song unless it feels like me, and I'm not gonna release a song or put it on an album or play it in concert unless it really feels like me.

I always liked playing music and I always wanted to be good at playing guitar. I always saw myself as an old man living in the mountains playing a guitar, but I didn't really turn that into a desire to be a professional musician or a singer or a rock star or anything like that.