To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity.

There's a part of me that wishes I'd never said one single solitary word on any subject publicly. Then I could have been the tortured poet, and there's so much mileage in that. But it's too late to stop now.

An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.

Will there be any bartenders up there in Heaven, will the pubs never close?

But music can save your life sometimes. It probably saved me from working in a bank or something. That's a kind of salvation right there.

What I wanted to hear didn't exist, so it was necessary for me to go out and create it.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.