Sometimes you need a good view out the window. It doesn't have to be pretty; it just has to be something to base your thoughts around. Even though for years I just looked out at a a brick wall and wrote. Laughs.

The angle of the light is important also. I found that there are certain seats at the table that are better to sit in for that purpose. It might be like tracing magnetic north. I don't get it, but there are certain places that I know that if I sit there I will receive something. It's almost like being in a portal. I don't know how that works, but there are certain portals I'll find myself at where things come quickly,. The trick is finding those portals.

You mentioned planes and trains as a good place to get writing done. It's forced isolation, true, but I also wonder how much the role of movement affects your writing process.

Absolutely. If you were on the plane but were stuck on the runway, it would be like being in a traffic jam. That wouldn't be the same. Watching things go by the windows makes you really think.

Do you prefer pen and paper or a computer when you write lyrics, or does that not matter?

It does matter because writing with cheap utensils is horrible. It makes handwriting much worse. I'm quite narcissistic, and I don't like nasty handwriting. But sometimes when you're thinking, everything happens so fast that the handwriting becomes nothing more than scrawl. Over the last three or four years, I've written everything in pencil because if you write in pencil, you know you can erase it. There's never that awful feeling of permanence, and it's not the same as using a pen and crossing things out. I often want to change things quite a lot. I want to put down just the basic idea, and then with that shape I can fill it in and get much better lines. I hate the idea of writing something down then thinking Oh God this is it. Because when you do that, you back yourself into a corner. You may think it's fine, but surely telling yourself that because of the permanence of the ink. So I'd rather just erase it.

How much revising do you do?

If it's good, then very little. It's like a geologist panning for gold: you crack the song open and what you've got is perfectly formed. Other times you don't have a complete song, and that's more annoying because you really have to work to find better rhymes. Maybe if it's a very clear idea then your lines come quickly, but if the ideas are abstract it takes longer to fine tune.

When you revise, are you changing meaning or are you changing words?

It's mostly words so that they sound better. Since I'm writing to sing, I don't want to sing uncomfortably. If it sings uncomfortably, it sings badly. I also try to avoid clichés. You have to find somewhere between a cliché and something too contrived. I don’t want anything to sound too contrived. I must say that I also hate alliteration. That's one of the things that really annoys me, along with puns in songs. There's something so glib about puns that really pisses me off.

Is it because it's too easy, too unoriginal?

It's like a joke but it's not funny. I mean, sometimes puns can be fun if they're very clever. But all those things are exercises in cleverness rather than meaning. They aren't artistic; they're like headlines.

Have you found that being a visual artist has made you a more disciplined songwriter?

You can't do everything. Long ago I gave up on the idea of being a Renaissance man. People don't really trust that. It can be a burden to have all that talent. You have to prioritize one over the other. I could draw long before I could write songs, and I like painting but I'm not very good at it. I'm quite good with a pencil, though. My father drew a lot of cartoons so I come from that kind of family.