I always liked the magic of poetry but now I’m just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they’ve used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling...

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

I didn’t really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

Now I’m having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album – but I’m pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it’s meant I don’t drive a fancy...

I don’t know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist – you either are or you aren’t – and if you are you’ll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light,...

Now that I’m staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I’m less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for...

I feel like I’m stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it’s always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

Oh yeah – for sure – hardly a week doesn’t go by when I don’t hear something wonderful that someone has made in some low-budget situation, primarily with a view to selling a few hundred...

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades...

So why sign your name in blood for more? It seemed like a sensible arrangement for me. I didn’t sell large numbers of records and the record company paid advances they rarely recouped.

I’d make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn’t fit with expectation – I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

I’m pretty much below the radar of commercial visibility everywhere, though the US is indeed the place I’ve sadly most neglected.

There’s nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

I’ve been getting pretty focused about that recently, and even considered doing a masters degree to polish up the craft. I’ve been pretty lucky in that I seem to have found people online who are...

Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I’ve always felt about that decision – it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting...

If you feel driven and compelled to make your work and to be fiercely original and have something unique to say, in a compelling way, then chances are the helpers will be there for you...

In some ways it’s taken me decades to come clean and make honest work – and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical...

In the early days I really enjoyed the freedoms it offered because I was happy to work the long hours as long as I was working from home a lot.