Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that's part of my mental illness, social anxiety. Closeness to other people is really hard, but it's also a shame because it's all you want too. But it doesn't always work.
There's people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.
I'm so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I'm breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life. Eventually, they'll just go away, because you will make them sad. That's something I've proven quite adept at doing over the years.
That's where the songs come from: that's what I'd most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that's nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else's heart.
But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.
Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.
We waste a lot of our lives sometimes. There are people sitting across from us who would make the whole world better if we spent more time with them in it, but we can't get across that gully.
I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can't see how to do it.