Collaboration is such a thrill when you're working with someone you really respect. When it's just one person working alone you get a singular view of their world, and that can be great, too. But when you have different people working together with different aesthetics, different techniques, and different mediums, you get something bigger than both of them.

I guess I'm a really analytical person, but when I'm writing, all that stuff goes behind a screen. Analysis and taking things apart is really important and really interesting, but it's the direct opposite of creating something, which has to do with taking things and putting them together and hoping to make something unique that's more than the sum of its parts. And you can't do that with analysis, you can only take things into smaller and smaller pieces.

I never considered myself an Americana artist, but I'm a huge fan of old-time music from the States, the recordings that were made in the '20s and '30s. Trying to chase down the exact stylistic trappings of that stuff always felt like a dead end. That spirit of directness and economy, but also the poetic pungency of the writing and almost ugly, or raw, performance - all that seemed like the real message. I've just tried to somehow stay true to that feeling.

In a lot of ways, the way you're making your bread and butter is off people who aren't necessarily who you're writing for.

Everybody has had the experience of something they love - whether it's a pop song or a painting or a movie - feeling so perfect to them that it's almost like it came from another planet. It has nothing to do with ordinary life, which is very plain. And there's something depressing about that in a way, because you feel like you're this small little human, and you feel like it has nothing to do with you.

I'm not pro-life. I'm very emphatically pro-choice.

Songwriting is an emotional medium, and rock and roll is an emotional medium.