When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.

My big thing is to get onstage sober. Whatever happens from there happens. But you get onstage drunk and it's not going to be good. It takes a while. I have to sing a lot, so I can only drink so much. So most nights it's fine; even if I drink as much as I possibly can, I can't get that drunk.

I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.

You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

My style of lyric-writing is very specific and has a lot of details, and I think people react most to that.

A conversation with you is a different thing than projecting to a couple hundred people. It's bigger and more animated and it's on a bigger scope, but still in the heart, it's honestly me.

An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs.