I never wrote completely in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the Dylan comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of "Greetings" came from an unselfconscious place. Your early songs emerge from the moment when you're writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it's been just you and your music. That only happens once.

You lay claim to your stories; you honor, with your hard work and the best of your talent, their inspirations, and you fight to tell them well from a sense of indebtedness and thankfulness. The ambiguities, the contradictions, the complexities of your choices are always with you in your writing as they are in your life. You learn to live with them. You trust your need to have a dialogue about what you deem important.

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.

I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

You need two things to remain very, very present. You need to continue to write well and engage yourself in the issues of the day. And you have to continue to make good, relevant records.

I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done.

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.