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When you're writing a song, you have to know two things. You have to know who you are, and you have to think about other people.

Writing songs is really about writing. It's not about necessarily focusing on one particular style or making it one particular thing.

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.

The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.

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.

When you research prolific songwriters, it is usually later in their career they write songs that they distance themselves from, or it's about other people.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.

People write music, and the music is out there for people to interpret it how they want to.

If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.