Making music is mostly spontaneously following sounds you find compelling that you chase and see where they're leading you.

Making music is mostly spontaneously following sounds you find compelling that you chase and see where they're leading you.

Fire is a symbol for so much. It's a symbol for change. It's a symbol for destruction. Out of the ashes of that comes an opportunity to start over. It's one of the greatest metaphors in nature that you can possibly lean on, especially as a songwriter. You're trying to describe either something coming to a complete and utter end or something that is in flux, or something that's on the verge of becoming something else.

I stopped reading music reviews because it's somebody having a knee-jerk reaction to a song. I realized that that's not the definitive interpretation. It won't last long. It's a fleeting thing. What matters are people's relationships with these things over time and sometimes songs just take a really long time to reveal their true identity.

Some of us should learn to ask for bold things that require God.

As you get older, your songwriting starts to become less and less about you, and especially when you have kids and a family. You start to see the world through other people's eyes a lot more to the point where it's hard to go back and relate to that "me against the world" perspective that I think a lot of my earlier songs were about. It's not so much about "me against the world," it's, how do you make the best possible future for your kids to grow up in?

I think as an over-protective parent of my songs: I always feel like none of them get enough attention. There are the ones that get attention on the radio, but that's one thing. You always feel like people are not quite hearing what it is that you think makes a song special, and that takes time, too.