My song titles are always left-field or mean a lot to me.

I didn't never have to go to a therapist. I just always put it in a song and you heard me.

What happens with writing a song and demoing it, for me the demo always becomes the master.

I'm always conscious of what I'm writing, conscious of what the actor may ask me. I have a defense for nearly every line in the song.

I have pretty much always been about - if I write that song or whatever, it is all for Mercy Me. Anything I want to do is for Mercy Me.

I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.

I was carrying my friend in his casket to put him in the hearse, and I was thinking, 'I need to write a song for this guy, because he always told me I would have a No. 1 song.'

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

For me, I've always wanted to be a nun. I mean, I think about what it's like to be a nun. And I've always been fascinated with nuns, and I have a nun collection, I've been collecting nuns for 20 years. And I have a song that I wrote, 'I Wanna Be a Nun,' when I was 25.

Both Springsteen and Michael Jackson, who had these huge productions, could always scale them back down to just a song and a melody. All of that influences me. I also try to be a fictional writer, and sometimes I get close, but the things that resonate the most with me - and with everyone else - is what's real.

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