Typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything comes together in the song.

I went to Louisiana Tech, which is just down the road from where we lived. It was an easy college to get into.

When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it.

I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted - that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people.

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

I'm trying to find peace in the world, as it is. I'm feeling this sort of slow stripping of my mind, like the layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these little structures that have been imposed on me by my society that tell me how I'm supposed to view my life and the world. What I'm supposed to find to be important and what is not. Sometimes you see through so much of it that you feel like you're just a leaf blowing on the wind.

The music is supposed to be healing.