I'll love you when my eyes are open, I'll love you when my eyes are gone.

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter.

The more walking-around money I have, the less I walk around.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

It's the same thing: I would think, "If I can't go out and pull some teenager tonight, maybe I'm no good on stage anymore." And you start to think that you even need it as a motivation. I did, anyway.

I thought that if I practiced doing melodies for a year or so at home, I would learn to think melodically, and when I went to work it would come out, and it did, on this album. What else was important to me...? I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.

I don't get my bliss by listening over and over to people in the street thinking, "Boy, is it that good?" Even though every time I hear it that's what I think. But I get it in human situations. There is this little voice that is going, "The reason you're able to enjoy your life now is that you made it in rock'n'roll and people are giving you free visas all over the place. Dude, you are being spoiled".