Bill Callahan

I wanted to live in a house. I wanted to have a place where I could record at home - all of these things I'd wanted to do for years.

To see classic rock, you had to go to an arena. But punk was happening everywhere, even in little towns in the middle of nowhere in Maryland. I'd drive out to places I'd never been, just to go and see it.

At midnight every night, I would methodically leave the house for a couple hours' walk, come back in, and record. And then the sun came up. If I had done something good, then I'd be happy and go to sleep.

As a kid, I was just a kid. Average.

I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating by. It's something that I didn't start thinking about until recently, but you can hitch that ride, that narrative that's already been created. You just have to read it and write it down.

You know how on Christmas day, the day feels different, even if you're just sitting in your chair waiting for your girlfriend to put her face on and you haven't even started any of the festivities yet, the day still feels different. The electrons are fatter and pushier.

James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

I'm somewhere between a gumshoe and a journalist. A writer, not a symbol.

I feel like you come in under a cloak of someone else's skin for a while, but then you can shrug it off - you have to find your own voice, if you want to keep doing it. That became a really conscious thing for me.

When I write a song, it is to fill a niche in people's lives. To have a song for every experience if one hadn't been written yet.

There's so much chaos in life, I think I make music to make things feel calm and sane, to define something, to bring some meaning into it - it's a real peaceful thing to me.

I did a lot of work without thinking about it in a calm, rational way. Stopping and thinking about what I was doing made my music calmer and deeper in tone.