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As a songwriter, you try your best to write a good song, and you like nothing better than hearing a good song. It's easy to admire a great song, and you want to share out of enthusiasm.

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.

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

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.

When you're a writer, your song has to resonate with the person you're writing for in order for them to want to sing it. But if you're an artist, you can sing whatever you want.

I'm not really a songwriter - I'm an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart.

There's a lot of personal stuff that can go into songwriting but there's also a lot of dramatization and fictionalization. You have to do that to make a good song.

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.