Sometimes people come up and say, "You have this line in this song and it meant a lot to me." You don't always remember that line as the one. You're putting part of your human being on the page so people are going to have different responses - the other humans are going to connect with different parts.

I don't really pursue writing songs for other people. I guess one of the things I always think about is a good line in a song should be something I can hear myself saying.

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul.

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.

I think when you are doing a song you're trying to give people enough details that they connect.

There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.

It's good to have some kind of California in there. It's almost always appropriate. It's appropriate on a sunny day or late at night. If you grew up on the Grateful Dead, which I certainly did, you listened to 10 million bootlegs. But you realize that American Beauty has some really tight, well-arranged songs that aren't meandering.