Especially when you've got your own mail route, day after day, it was an easy place to write. It was like going to a library with no books. You're afforded to just go do your job, and you don't really even have to think about it. You know you're on the right street and you're at the right house, and you're putting the mail in the right box. That's where I wrote a lot of the early songs, walking on the mail route.

I've always been trying to write songs like Lightfoot. A song of mine like 'Come Monday' is a direct result of me trying to write a Gordon Lightfoot song.

I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.

In writing songs I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

A lot of my songs are fantasy. I can dream up all kinds of things. That's the kind of world I live in. It's very sort of flamboyant, and that's the kind of way I write. I love it.

I seem to write a lot of sad songs because I'm a very tragic person. But there's always an element of humour at the end.