Music is not a contest, it's not a competition, so giving out trophies seems a little bit like the sporting world I left behind when I was a kid.

I don't know... it's just too much fun to wonder about what life would be without gravity. I just started thinking about outer space more as an adult than I probably ever did as a kid. That was also inspiring, the concept of being stuck to the earth.

I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.

Here in New Orleans, what a lot of the musical families do - and this is a romantic concept on my part - is they teach their kids to tap dance first. Then after tap dance, you learn piano, and after piano, you get to pick between all the instruments that are out there.

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

Back then, I was an acoustically-oriented artist. Honestly, 'Poetry Man' wouldn't have been my first choice.

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.