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The key to songwriting is just to be able to observe, and put yourself in situations to be around people, and let those ideas come to you.

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.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

If anyone asks me about songwriting, I guess I'd say that you just gotta do it.

Songwriting is kind of like a craft. It's not something that just comes in a dream. You've got to work at it.

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.

Every song I write is autobiographical and is about people, and that's one of the things that gets complicated. You have to decide where's your place as a songwriter.