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But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good.

One Direction are super cool.

I'm not a trained musician or singer, but I can turn out a song.

One song will launch you, but you don't want to be a one-song artist.

I think any song should sound good just played on a solitary instrument with the vocal. If you have those basics you have all you need. The production then just polishes that idea into the finished thing.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

I don't think I've ever laid out a batch of songs that pick myself apart the way that these do.

The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.

If you're working with a producer like Rick Rubin or whatever, you sing each line probably 30 different ways. Each time, they're like, 'Can you try it this way? Can you try it that way?' That's each line in the song, for each song.

Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.