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For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Whatever I write has to evolve around my taste in music at that moment, because that always changes.

Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

I always write lyrics first and the rhythm and the melody come from the lyrics. It always comes from the lyrics: words have rhythm and words have melody.

I come from a jazzy, acoustic, folky background. Everything has to work with melodies; the words have to have meaning.

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it.

I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.