I have a very strange relationship in general with women around my music. There's some that understand it and some that think there should be a law against it.

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.

One thing that I'm really interested in is the kind of esoteric detail that surrounds these great figures. And Wikipedia is full of that kind of stuff, whether it's true or untrue. It staggers me: why, in the short space assigned to a person or an event, that kind of random information is there. To be honest, that's wonderful fuel for songwriting.

I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.

Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.