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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.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn't get some of that stuff out.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

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.

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.

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.

Sometimes when you're a songwriter, you kind of have this egotistic thing: you just want to write something that you love, and you don't care about if people like it or not, but personally, I want to write something that people can jive to.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

I see what other people do and what songwriters don't. They don't get out and take care of themselves. Producers turn themselves into a massive brand. Songwriters tend to be under someone else's umbrella. If you're building your own legacy, it can't be under an umbrella.

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.