I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.

When I'm writing a lyric, I totally forget about the music. I'm just looking at the lyric and thinking about it almost as a separate entity. And then I'll go to my keyboard with all the lyrics printed out and try to think of how to make this a complete musical thing. I've got a very basic keyboard with some presets.

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.

I have not made any plans for the future, and my wife would kill me if I announced anything before that.

In times of crisis what has made America amazing has been the fact that, throughout our history, throughout the more than 200 years of our history, there have been men and women of courage, who stood up and decided it was more important to look out for the future of their children and their grandchildren than their own political futures.

In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.

I still remember, as a kid, tying a yellow ribbon around a tree in front of my house during the 444 days that Iran held 52 Americans hostage. Iran is not a place we should be doing business with.