“The piano is just a different animal. It’s expensive, it’s big, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t fit in the mix easily.”

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.

Notes don’t make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

I have manic energy. What can be done about it? I don’t know what to say sometimes. I’m professional in public, but I like to stay inside and be a hermit.

White people don’t sing together very often, and when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

Being capable of anything is a bullshit concept, unless it means you also admit that you’re capable of cheating, lying and killing.

The press is like any business. Its a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.

I’m romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not.

I’m aware that I’m very fringe, and it’s nice that way.

You can’t really control how people hear stuff. It’s hard to remember that. I have to let go of it.

I do think that when you make repeated mistakes, it’s usually because you’re just not coming to grips with something.

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that’s the right song to not fight the lyric.

I feel like a quote out of context.

There is still some art in pop music. But it can’t happen if you’re not inspired.

Next door, there’s an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.

I could probably live in Bali the rest of my life and completely live in the sticks and have a f – king moped and make a record every couple of years and not step in public and break even like I do anyway. That’s really tempting.

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

Got two kids; one’s a record producer who lives just up the road from me – great guitarist and piano player, too.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.

I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano.

I might as well get a piano and start an Elton John tribute act!