The older I get, the more I feel those kinds of ghosts - especially the women in my life - moving out of the shadows a bit more and becoming more present in my life.

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

That's what I like about watching a movie: you enter an imagined world that's more interesting, more engaging than your own. Or less painful than your own.

I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.

Guns are part of the American psyche, aren't they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It's intrinsic to the American psyche. It's never going to change.

Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.

Anything that I'm doing I'm writing specifically for a particular project.