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With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

I've written more songs for this record than I ever have in the past so I'm trying to give it a lot of special attention to be sure my ideas really get translated right.

People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.