I am a one-trick pony. If you tell most people to draw a picture of a tree, they'd draw 35 branches and 10,000 leaves. I will draw you a tree with four branches and three leaves, and I'll spend the rest of the week drawing inside of each leaf. In terms of the grand gesture, I reserve that maximum turbo blast energy for what I do as an artist, and I sing and dance for dinner.

Music journalists love Elvis Costello and hate me because they look like Elvis Costello

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

It doesn't matter the kind of music, it doesn't matter whether it's a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don't care if it's outer space or pop, the spirit is the same.

People ask me how far I've come. And I tell them twelve feet: from the audience to the stage.

Music is like girlfriends to me; I'm continually astonished by the choices other people make.

In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you're down below 14th Street in New York City, that's bohemian; that's left-wing.