I want to write songs that look people in the eye and I want them to mean something.
I think as I've gotten older, it's become easier to write about real things, because it's true what they say about writers and having to have experiences.
I focus primarily, when I'm writing songs, on the melody first, and the way that words come out of my mouth and the way that they sound in a particular lyric, kind of like a balancing act between the sound of the word and the meaning of the word.
If I'm making a painting, it's so easy to ruin it by overdoing it and continuing to work on it. It loses its looseness, or the line quality that makes it beautiful. The same thing is true of a song. Sometimes the first take is the best one.
I started writing my first record when I was about 20.