You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.

When I’m singing “Deanna,” for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.

Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists - second rate Christianity.

To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It's exhausting.