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Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.

The difficult thing about a pop record is that you're given guidelines: it has to have 3 choruses, and then it must be between 3 minutes fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-five seconds.

Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America.

I mean, Beatles songs were two and a half minutes long, and they're fantastic.

When you get married and have children, and you start having hits and success and your business starts growing, there's less and less time for songwriting.

I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.

We just wrote songs that seemed good to us. We wrote the album in like two weeks. We could have had more time, but we accomplished what we needed to in the two weeks.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

Most of those takes were one take. I made those records in three minutes. I didn't have time to get nervous or scared the first time I sang it. It was all 'live' and I enjoyed it so much.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.