Usually for me, the melodic structures come out in the water and the lyrical ideas could come from a book I'm reading.

Music is mere tuning a song with words; to some degree you have a beautiful endeavor of cosigning God's blank checks and you're actually co-creating. You're certainly not the creator with the capital C, but you're embarking on an endeavor, you're using the building blocks that have been given to you by the author of time and space.

I'm always thinking about songs, I'm thinking of life maybe a little bit more lyrically than a computer programmer or someone like that.

You want songs to sound cohesive with the other songs on the record but when you first start writing you just want to write to tell the truth.

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life hands you hurricanes, you go surfing.

I've never really had a desk job, but I've died one day at a time all over the place.

Experience is all I have. I equate song-writing with archeology. Every day you dig. You dig into different places within yourself - even finding places that you've rarely been. And buried within the soil is song.