Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.

I find myself to be truly primal and passionate. Everything I do comes from a primal place.

I find it slightly uncomfortable to see my face on a bus or a poster. I like just being known by my friends and family.

I used to have a dog, and I was very close to my dog, and he passed away, so when I need to bring out a moment where I'm crying, I bring out that moment. His name was Rinkles. All of the boys in my family's names are spelled with an 'R,' and he was a boy, so he was Rinkles with an 'R,' not a 'W.'

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

I wouldn't say that a big family is for everybody, and I've brought my kids, for example, to New York City, and I can tell you it's much harder to raise that number of kids in a city like New York than it is to raise them in rural Wisconsin where I live.