I feel like my songs are very relevant and very meaningful, but I literally have to get rid of the nostalgia for shows because I would just be mess on-stage otherwise.
All performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience. I might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there, I'm a mess. But I have to take the risk; otherwise, I'd be miserable and would feel like I wasn't seeing through my personal destiny.
If I'm uncomfortable on stage, everybody can see it. I'm not very good at hiding it. I like long, loose jacket dresses - anything that I can literally have room to move in - not that I'm a very big dancer, but because sometimes I'm sitting down at the keyboard, and then sometimes I'm standing. It just has to feel good.
We're very historically tried and true when it comes to our albums. We pick the best songs; we get rid of the songs we feel don't fit on the album, and we don't work on remixing or remastering albums.
I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.
I feel so fortunate, Because some people think, well you're just relegated to the sideline. But I feel valued there. They trust me. We work very, very hard at making it worthwhile. We are not going to just be down there spewing a bunch of blah. With our halftime talking to the coaches we are really trying to get something meaningful there and something that helps spin the game forward.
I think a band - even a band that's been around as long as the Rolling Stones - I think that's still the formula. You know you're gonna get those songs, and you don't mind sitting through the ones that you maybe don't know very well because you know they're not gonna let you down - they're not gonna mess with you. And I kind of feel the same way about the way I structure my shows.
I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated.
I've always been a singer-songwriter - it started off with me and the guitar, just writing songs, they were very simple. When I got in the studio it took me probably three years to get where I am now - being open to experimenting with new songs, being comfortable with where the songs were headed. I'm happy with where they are because they feel very genuine and authentically who I am.
I think a lot of my songs are very silly and very stupid, written to entertain people, but in the end, I always come to that last line, and I feel that I have to wrap this up with a bit of dignity and a little tear in the eye; otherwise, the joke would be on the characters in the song.
There has to be an interaction of musicians on stage. Otherwise I feel too alone up there. When performing is really good, when it really works, maybe once every 15 shows, it's very special, and you realize that's why you do it.
I just get excited doing shows. Off stage I am actually very feeble and must be spoon-fed because my hands are too brittle.
I'm very easily influenced, and I'm also a quick study, so I think when I decided I wanted to write pop songs, I literally just listened to pop radio for six months to get a feel for it and understand it.
When I'm writing obviously I have all the nostalgia in the world, I have all the emotion in the world, but then when I actually perform, I need to just perform it, and that's it. I do retain like a little bit of it because I have to, I sing and perform the songs so I have to - it's a performance of the songs - but I just have to get the right balance.
I find that when I get on stage now, I don't want to perform a lot of my songs because they don't feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.
If President [Barack] Obama - President [Donald] Trump shows up with a, you know, cleaver and just says, I can get rid of all these regulations, I can get rid of ObamaCare, no problem at all, then that would be a mistake.
I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.