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Obviously, fans are the beginning and end for any artist. The minute your fans embrace you and accept you, you begin this ride of being in music and having a career doing something you love. You get to go be a kid and live out your dreams by performing music for fans who come out to your shows.

You either have fans who stick with you, or they don't. It comes down to making music that people connect with and great fans.

Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.

If certain songs become popular enough to the point where I'll be playing them the rest of my life, I don't want them all to dwell on the same down moment that I'll have to keep reliving.

I feel like that's so important, to enjoy my own music. Because if I'm not passionate about my music, then it's going to show to the fans.

Once you've changed who you are or who you've portrayed in your music, the fans, they'll catch it... Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.

Once a song's out there, it's no longer mine. And that's the whole purpose of music: to belong to people.

I understand it's my role to realize people's dreams. I'm O.K. with that so long as my songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.

I don't think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they're fans because I'm a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around.