Music is my thing. It's my thing; it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me; it's Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.

On Heartbreaker, I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs.

This is going to sound crazy, but I can hear music in my head. I can imagine a piano or a guitar playing, and I can sort of think out.

There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.

Can you still have any famous last words if you're somebody nobody knows?

I'm not the cool thing, and I'm not going to be the cool thing for a really long time, and it isn't like I'm not the cool thing and I sell 3,000,000 records every time. I'm not the cool thing, and I barely sell 150,000 records, if that, ever. So I'm obviously working really hard to sustain myself. I'm actually a target to be dropped, because that's just not enough records for a big company.

Collaboration has become really integral to my process. I play music so that I can spend time with my friends and communicate in that way. I experience so much joy in that process, because, you know, it's those times of getting together and playing music and all that comes with it that are the best for me.