That's what we [outsiders] feel America is really about - the kind of crazed ravings of the Christian right - when it's probably something quite different.

I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything.

Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They're a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated.

I've always been at war with the guitar. All vocalists are fighting a war with the electric rhythm guitar.

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.