The rock & roll industry is very incestuous, and we have all been close at one time or another. A lot of beautiful music and a lot of beautiful times came from that. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

I believe that I am male and I am female.

My first four albums covered the usual youth problems - looking for love in all the wrong places - while the next five are basically about being in your 30s.

I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.

I have lost my credibility as a hit maker because of these side excursions into other branches of music; by not being consistent. Consistency seems to be all-important.

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.