I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you’re wrong, you’re soppy, sentimental.
I don’t feel any pressure from fans. But I’m always in some kind of state of emotional turmoil. I would not describe myself as happy-go-lucky. That’s not to say that I’m not happy.
I met my old lover on the street last night. She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled. Then we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers, still crazy after all these years.
The dialogue between what’s going on in the world and what’s going on internally seems to be a natural thing – well, it’s natural to me, anyway, to have these thoughts.
I’m always going forward toward something, and that something is usually an album, because I like to record. I probably like to record more than I like to write.
I don’t know what I’m going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can’t see around the bend and you don’t know where you are going to go, which is fun.
I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.
Given all the facts that I’m young and I’m in good health and I’m famous – that I have talent, I have money – given all these facts, I want to know why I’m so unhappy.
After all those years of automatic success, you don’t get nervous any more. It’s really necessary to be nervous and be a little bit frightened. It pumps the adrenalin into you and you really get down there and try.
The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn’t really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.
