I don't make records for this medium with which we're going to sell it. The selling of it can never be more important than what you're actually making. There's too much of that in the world - in everybody's world, not just in music. There's too much, "Are you hip to this kind of stuff?" "Hey, this is cool." "Are you hip to it, because this is what we're selling today?" I think it's bullshit.

I've said the line about Ray Charles a million times, but nobody listens to him singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" and wonders who Ray can't stop loving. They apply that to their own lives. That will happen with my songs.

I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."

I don't know if embarrassed is the right word, about pop, but I prefer the abstract and the distorted in music. And I keep writing these proper melodies and harmonies, and they're the bits that get thrown out of the records! And I have quite a collection.

Everybody's looking for some kind of authenticity in music. Or some kind of truism, you know, "This is true!" And the thing about gospel music is, these people are singing about their faith. So it always comes across with, as authentic, you know? Gospel choirs put across this amazing sound but they're singing from the heart because they truly believe it. And I kind of have that faith, but I just have that faith in music.

Sometimes it's easier to make decisions when you know that you've tried things that are so wrong, you know, "OK, I don't go that way with it. I don't go this way with it." The way I work, I kind of have to go down all those wrong paths to know that the one I'm doing really is the one that is going to work.

In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.