One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.

I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write.

The way the vocal folds work is that they can get inflamed and in pain, but actual tears in the folds are somewhat rare. I've never torn anything. Been too strained plenty of times.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday, and you're 17 years old.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.

Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that's got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it.

I think I am a religious person just by nature. I think I sort of view everything through the lens of some inner undying thing in people that drives them to act as they do or to feel ashamed of not acting in some other way.

I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade.

Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.

The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.

I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.

'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! If you're standing in the middle of a ring, and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.

I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.

You want the song to be at least at the same level of goodness throughout. Whereas with something you're doing live, a song dips and rises and that can actually be worked to the song's benefit.

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

People like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree,' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.

I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.

I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.

Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.

Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.

I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.

The more established you are, the less likely you are to do something ridiculous, which is one reason I'm proud to put out a wrestling album. If you stop and you go, 'Well, what if people don't like it?,' if you're already established in what you do, that'll strike fear into your heart.

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.

Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.

I got a promo of 'Nichts Muss' in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.

I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it.

I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.

A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind.