I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.

The singing tells everybody what to do musically.

I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.

Rock music is the province of the young, and it should be made by young people. I'm not running around in a pair of spandex tights trying to reclaim my youth.

I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.

I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.

After a while, you just don't do things you don't wanna do - that's the great freedom you get, the older you get. You learn what to do and what not to do, and what will be a waste of time and what won't be a waste of time.