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There are so many great songs yet to sing.

There are so many songs out there in the world that - if I know we have to come up with a new cover, then I'll just sit in my room and sing song after song and figure out which one I can kind of sing the best.

Occasionally, you get a nice surprise when someone covers your song in an extraordinary way.

I wanted to write songs that were as good as the covers.

My idea of covers is that you should never cover a song and do it exactly like the artist because everyone's always going to compare it to the way the original artists did it, and they're just going to go, 'Oh I like the original better.'

A song is the most intangible thing in the world.

With great artists like Elvis, sometimes the songs weren't the greatest thing about him. When I tried to perform some of the songs, I noticed some of the tunes weren't all that brilliant, but it was the performance that sold them.

For me as a songwriter, I love when other people cover my songs.

I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words.

Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.