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.

Gatekeeper was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I havent written many like that.

Musically, I didn't relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there - I don't think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.

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

But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There's always a promoter, there's always a rider, there's always a shower, and there's always a stage.

If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.

So, I'm on Sesame Street, walking around with all these monsters, Elmo and his buddies, a whole bunch of chickens, a whole bunch of penguins and a number four dancing about. It was just pure joy, simple, ridiculous fun, stupid joy. There's no irony. Sesame Street is just a crazy great place to be.