When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.

The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.

I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.

I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for myself, trying to compare how many records I've sold or how much money I've made.