Music has always felt very real to me.

I feel like I'm getting better as a writer and as a singer and that there is more to discover there, so hopefully other people feel that way too without having to disassociate with the earlier work.

How long have you been sitting in the darkness? You forget. You know you're getting hard to be with and you're crying every time you turn around. Oh my crazy baby, try to hold on tight. Oh my crazy baby, don't put out the light. And your hands are shaking something awful as your worries crawl around inside your clothes.

I make myself suffer with a lot of self doubt.

It's not just something that you do intellectually when you do music. You do it with your body, and you do it with your emotions, and you do it with every part of yourself. It engages your mind as well, but engages all parts of yourself.

I try to bear pain and not panic. I try to remember that it's got an expiration date, even if I don't know when that expiration date is. And I try to use it as fuel for my work.

I think I had a tendency to get stuck inside my head and go to some very dark places in my mind, and get stuck there. I couldn't see a way to get out.

I try to stay in gratitude as much as I can. You know, we all get to the point where we're frazzled, or tired, or frustrated, or whatever it is, but I try to take those moments and realize that I do have so much to be grateful for, and allow it to send me back to those feelings of gratitude and just live in gratitude as much as I can.

We've been together so long, I hope it just wasn't the drugs.

With me, it's so eclectic and all over the map that no one knows what to expect, ... It may not be a great career move, but all these things - singing with the Funk Brothers and the Dead, singing a Dolly Parton song - is great. I'm welcome to all these different worlds, and that's been wonderful.

I try to use pain as fuel for my work.

There's so many different ways humans have used music to express the spiritual part of our nature and to connect us with the divine. So for me the pathway is through music.

Being an artist is not exactly the most universally respected, or secure thing to do with your life. It can be frightening and you can feel that you're taking a lot of risks just with your own life, and your family's security. But the rewards outweigh those things.