Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It's really, like, physically painful, and it's a brand of crazy I don't appreciate having.
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 find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.
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.
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.
The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.
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.
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.
I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.
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.