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

Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.

I've always been around musicians and always been the songwriter who doesn't end up playing the music.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

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.

I prefer to hear an artist's work and what they can do, so as far as I'm concerned, I'd get a lot more out of a collection of songs to be able to understand what the musician is doing.

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.

Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.

There's a lot of craft that goes into achieving a hit song - at the beginning of your career, you're usually more inspiration than craft, and you get great when those intersect. A skilled songwriter can get you to that intersection.

It's true when they say songwriting is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. In truth, what happens is... songs comes through you.