“I’ll pick up a musical instrument and a melody presents itself and I say, what would that melody do if I tried to build on it, until I have roughly a song.Then words start flying at me and I look through my notebooks for similar words. It’s like building a tree backwards. Most people, if they built a tree, they would start with the roots and then a trunk and then add branches and twigs and leaves. What I do is I start madly throwing leaves in the air, then twigs, then branches, and so forth, and somehow hope they’ll all get attached.”