You're making something that won't be what it is until some unknown date in the future. All aspects of the personal disappear.

With women, you always have to make an educated decision to figure out what they're thinking. It's not one that's necessarily sympathetic, always. Of course, we're all human beings, but the gender thing is big thing. And a great thing.

I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.

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

One thing that the Internet has created is the sense that information is at your fingertips, when it's really only a very, very limited, specific, and slanted kind of information.

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.

The ideal is to put on shows where, if you go into the same space again, you don't remember ever having been there before, because where you were was a space that only existed that one time, created by the music.