I'm obsessed with the science of music. I'm obsessed with the way you can string notes together and they can do something, and you play the same notes in another way and they do nothing. How the essence within songs - within words, within lyrics - finds its place.

My songs get to a stage where they resist any further change, you know? And that's kind of where they are, short of re-recording or starting again. That's kind of where it's gonna be.

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.

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.

I used to listen to so much doo-wop, and I've talked a lot about gospel music, but I realised a lot of that language came from doo-wop music. You know, "I Asked the Lord Above," "Heaven Sent Me an Angel." That's rock-'n-roll, and that's where a lot of this language is coming from. Also, I've said before that as soon as you start having a conversation with Jesus in a song you know you're dealing with issues of morality and how fragile it is to be human. It's a shortcut to putting those ideas across.

You know, I'm unable to make those records where you just go in a studio and that's it. I think you can capture so much more on a record than just a particular performance on one day.

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.