I've tried over the years all kinds of ways of going about writing and even just thinking about the idea of writing. There was a time when I decided to try to write a song each day. Whether it was good or bad wasn't important.

With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me.

I was studying sculpture and painting and was working on a degree so I could become a teacher. I really liked teaching, and it was something I was pursuing when I got out of school.

I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.

That's something that seems to happen when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.

If I had a normal life Id quite cheerfully go mad and fall over right now

I'm interested in that way we perceive things, and that was part of what I was getting into in painting - the idea of perception and how information goes through our heads and it comes out another way.