When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

I'm both kinds of a person; I have a side of me that's very light and very optimistic and finds everything surreal and hilarious, and then I have a side of me that's - I don't know what the right word is - tormented or just feels very overwhelmed.

I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

I feel like there's just so much of everything that I don't know what people have heard and what they haven't heard. I think with the fact that there's the Internet and that people can share home-made recordings, I think a lot of the songs do get to be heard, even if it's not the best quality, or there's clinking glasses or it's just piano and voice, people can at least hear the song.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

You decide if you're ready for something. It can come in the guise of, "Oh, I don't think I like this."