I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

My ignorance would require a volume to itself. Between its covers would be preserved a record of the spurious model of all creation I had in my head, a prelapsarian construct, uncorrupted by the facts.

I'd done a drawing of the model using only peripheral vision, looking at a spot on the wall to the right of where she sat. It wasn't really a drawing of her I produced; it was a drawing of the cloud of lights and darks she dissolved into when I focused on the spot. You could look at my drawing of this cloud and read it as a nude female figure, though a little translation was required.

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.

I'm not a visionary, but I've spent half my life drawing things Imagined, Remembered, and Observed, comparing the differences between them, and my study confirms that "the difference between night and day / is not as great as people say."

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

Anyone who grew up in the psychedelic '60s probably experienced their share of hypnagogic fireworks. Just as sex got me hooked on anatomy, so drugs were probably what first got me interested in entoptic phenomena, phosphenes, and hypnagogic imagery.