When I was 15, I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.

I'm just upset and disappointed in myself that I left them hanging for seven minutes (while I was on the bench). I feel like I let the young guys down.

At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.

I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.