I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me.

The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.

Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk.

I was really looking forward to doing the thing that I do - I basically appear just at the beginning and at the end of the 'The Glory of the World' play - but when I got to opening night, I started to get really sad that that was the last time I was going to see the play as a spectator without actually being in it.

I think most great actors have their own life trajectory, the character motion doesn't have anything to do with their life motion.

I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.