“I know when the time has come to throw it in the trash can. With a child you’ve got to go to therapy and put it in daycare and buy it birthday presents.”

They’re all a huge influence on me. For me, just following rock history and watching Darkness On the Edge of Town and realizing that’s it’s okay to be obsessed with a snare sound because Bruce Springsteen was obsessed with a snare sound.

With a song, you can shove it in a dark closet and tell it you’ll be there when you’re ready.

The more you tour, the better the band gets, and you get caught up in a lot more things than just traveling. It becomes a way to survive.

When you start getting into a full-band, democratic context the little things almost immediately get thrown out the window because you don’t think they’re important.

Touring is a rough thing. You don’t have any time to look around or stop and think if what you’re doing is making you happy.

It’s rare in life to look at all the people around you and realize that they’re all invested in what you’re doing.

Neil Young, who isn’t really evident when you listen to my music, is probably my favorite of the legends, besides Dylan.

I think that’s why it feels like songs are really connected, and I like that. They’re all worked on kind of like a little family.

You’re not so focused on the minutiae. You’re focused on the overall feel, and that’s the stuff that I get from the demos.

I always work on the songs all together up until the very end. I never mix a song and think, “Okay, now that one’s done.”

First impressions are always the most important.

When you’re in the moment and not over thinking the song is when things tend to really work.

I love when people will say, “Oh, my songs are my children.” I understand that, but I’m also not afraid to kill my kids.

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

I must take issue with the term ‘a mere child’, for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Maturity – among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don’t teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply… For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that’s the inheritor of our fear.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.