“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.”

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.

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

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.

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

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to share his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes.

I always write about war, love, death, and injustice. There’s plenty of that around, so I never run out of ideas.

Grief is like a wheel that goes around and around the world.

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down.

Great advice comes from people that have been around a lot longer than you.

Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send instant messages around the globe, reflect on the past, assess the present and imagine the future.