I was grateful to be away from all that familiarity, to have a chance to do something anonymously.

I've always been a bit wary of keyboards because there's an invisibility to it - you're not really hitting anything.

If you keep bashing your head against the same wall, at some point you're going to fall over and be still for awhile.

Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.

When I stopped touring, it was like trying to stop a bullet train or a giant lead ball falling from a 100 stories up - it's momentum and it doesn't just stop. I drew a line in the calendar and made it a brick wall and just stopped dead. There was no other way. It would've taken another 100 years to slow down slowly. I had to let myself imagine a calendar with no lines; when every single day is being predetermined six months in advance, there's no more fluidity to time.

I was in a crazy, private, awesome bubble again, and that's when I started to write.