“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

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

To my inner child, I promise I am trying my best to heal from everything that hurt you. I promise I am trying to become the person you need me to be so we can both be whole.

I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children’s book was something that I’d been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

Teach them to think, ‘I’m not stupid’. No child wants to fail. Everyone wants to succeed.