From the notebooks.

I played the same chord for forty minutes this morning. Not because I was stuck. Because I wasn't finished listening to it.

There is a frequency inside a minor seventh that most people rush past. It contains something — I have never found the word for it — something close to the feeling of a city at dawn when you are the only one who knows you are leaving.

Came back to the house where I grew up. The walls still hold the humidity of forty summers.

I sat at a table that was not there when I was a child and wrote a song in twenty minutes. It will take someone else's voice to make sense of it. That is not a complaint.

A melody is not invented. It is recovered. This is the only thing I know with certainty after thirty years of composition.

The songwriter's job is archaeology, not architecture.

Spent the afternoon listening to rain on the window of a flat I was borrowing from someone I barely knew. By evening I had three new songs.

I have stopped trying to understand the relationship between discomfort and productivity. I accept it the way one accepts the behavior of a difficult but indispensable collaborator.

The best melody I have ever written — I did not write it. I woke at 4am with it fully formed. I went to the piano in the dark to confirm it existed.

It did. It does. It always will.

Note to self: stop apologizing for the simplicity of a good chorus. Complexity is easy. Simplicity that makes someone cry in their car is the hardest thing in music.

Do that.