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It's hard to write music for specific things, because I'm always writing just to write.

There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

Songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.

Sometimes a song indicates that it wants to be about a certain thing. And then if you write it, you find that it is about something that you've done.

You need to get outside of your comfort zone to write songs that are interesting, songs that are compelling, songs that are different from what other people are writing.

Songwriting isn't always something that's directly proportionate to the experience.