Okay, a truly great song is a song that makes its own aesthetic intentions clear and then lives up to them and exceeds them in an interesting way. Alright?

I write songs by sitting around in bars, so drinking songs are a little obvious. It's surprising that I don't write entirely drinking songs, since I am, in fact, drinking while writing the song. Drinking and love are the two principal sources of pleasure outside of music. There's only so many sources of pleasure, really. That's about it. Well, there are other arts as well. But none of them are as pleasurable as music, on a physical level.

There are so many clichés in the world, especially in music, that it's a never-ending creative font to just bring two of them together and let them interact.

I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.

Yeah, except that when I write pop songs I have pretty strict constraints that I impose on myself. 69 Love Songs is a constraint. That the titles have to begin with "I'"s is a relatively strict constraint. Charm of the Highway Strip is all travel songs. And I am free to change the plot slightly to accommodate something that happens to rhyme conveniently.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.