I think the biggest, saddest thing that happens in our lives is that we just don't embrace the things that could make it better because they don't seem to make it better at any given moment or we can't decide how to get across the aisle to that person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've spent most of my life living in cities where people are obsessed with looking down on people from everywhere else. You get so used to doing it that you start to believe it's simply what everyone does. It makes for an atmosphere of unwelcome that penetrates much of our modern life. It's a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.
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.
There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.
It's impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It's the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.
Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.