I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.

If you see me performing, you're going, that guy is simply the most extroverted guy I've ever seen. But if you've seen me very often on a daily basis and all the while growing up, I was very, very introverted. Very introverted. So I have sort of the extremes of both of those characteristics.

Mental illness and creativity are - it's a thin line in between the two. I tend to believe that.

From the town of Lincoln Nebraska with a sawed off .410 on my lap, through the Badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path.

Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

Because we lived in the presence of the church and the convent and the rectory and the school 24-7. And this was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers.

I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.