You can put out an album and it could be totally out of the window as far as what you want to do performance-wise.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that.

Then it evolved into more of a ballad style singer/songwriter thing. And there was a conflict in trying to merge the two styles with the same band behind me. 'Cause the musicians that I would need to do ballad-oriented tunes would require musicians who were more into jazz.

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.

I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.

I'd been performing in bands since I was 12 which represented, at that point, about 16 years of playing music.