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I think in some ways, it can do a listener a disservice to explain a song. I think I'd rather leave a little room for people to put themselves in it.

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.

Whenever I get an idea for a song, even before jotting down the notes, I can hear it in the orchestra, I can smell it in the scenery, I can see the kind of actor who will sing it, and I am aware of an audience listening to it.

That's the perfect audience: singing along to every word, knowing the songs, appreciating the non-hit songs, stuff like that.

I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.

Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.

I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.

We do play to our audience. It's very important. You can't create music in a vacuum.

It's weird because when you initially write a song, you write it with no understanding that the world is maybe going to hear it one day. So when you go into the studio, you don't see the hundreds of people at a gig or the viewers on TV, you just write a song without any inhibitions or boundaries.

I have to have music on when writing, or else the silence swallows me whole.