On Songwriting:
I do not believe that a songwriter creates the songs he writes; I believe they are channeled from somewhere else, another plane of existence. The gift of the songwriter is a connection to this other plane. The songwriter went out and found his songs, or they found the songwriter.
Some songs are potatoes; you find where they're growing, dig them out of the ground, wash them off a bit and scrape some things off, and then it's edible right away. And there are Soo many ways you can cook a potato. Other songs are flowers, they're nice to look at but you can't eat them. Others are animals, usually ones you have to kill before they're useful; but others still make good sideshows while alive, the only thing is you have to feed them.
It's great finding the occasional potato and mushroom and rare flower, but what I'm mostly interested in is the animals. Strange animals that no one's seen before, or rare ones they've only read about or seen in zoos. Anyone can go out and bring back a duck or a deer; I'm interested in bringing back elephants, jabberwocks, and bonedogs. I'm not very successful too often; those are pretty rare creatures. Of course, this kind of meat isn't for everyone, and I because of this I could never expect a majority of people to like my music, just the strange minority (and I'd prefer it that way; Tom Waits is my hero). Also, it's not only the meat you bring home; you hang the head on your wall, you reconstruct and mount the skeleton; there's the ornamental songs that are basically like flowers; nice to look at (sometimes to smell?), but you can't do much else with them. And then there's the unedible parts that have practical uses, like using the hooves to make glue, using skulls as bowls, making canes out of femurs, making soap out of fat. But as nice as practical and ornamental songs are, the classic ones are those that are edible, because you can get them inside you and they become part of you.
The selection of weapon is also very important when you go song hunting. I don't consider myself a guitarist; I'm a Marksman. My acoustic is a longbow, my electric is a rifle (of varying sizes, depending on how I rig up the rest of my equipment; it can be a .22, a 30-ought-six, a 12-guage shotgun, or a tranquilizer gun, and anything inbetween). You have to be careful what you use; shoot a crow with a 30-ought-six and you'll blow him to pieces (especially if you shoot him 16 times), and a bow just doesn't cut it against a charging rhinoceros. If you use the wrong instrument when you're trying to write a song, you'll either never bring the creature down and it will run away or you won't have enough left of it to bring home, and you'll have to find another one (which is very difficult if you're hunting for rare creatures). Every instrument is its own weapon; horns, depending on how they're played, are either cannons or blowguns; drums are explosives, snares, nets, or bear traps. And keyboards are excellent as vehicles to get everyone there.
Once you kill the song and bring him home, you can do whatever you want to him, but you have to be careful. Cut him up the wrong way and you'll ruin him. Leave him in the oven too long and he'll burn, not long enough and there's the risk of trichinosis. And if you leave him sitting long enough he'll spoil. You've only got so much time to make something useful out of the corpse, otherwise you'll have to go kill another one. And there's never two that are just alike. Of course, you can bring them back alive if you don't think they'll keep for the journey home (the really good stuff is far, far away in the jungle, on the bottom of the ocean, in the desert) or you don't have any ideas for them right away. But if you do that you have to make sure you feed them until it's time to get the axe and you have to make sure they don't escape. Sometimes it's better this way, 'cause you can use this time to fatten them up if they don't have enough meat on them. But a lot of things won't grow too well in captivity, and others are hard to accomodate (just try keeping an elephant fenced up in your back yard. And then feed him).
And that's the way I approach songwriting. The same concept of hunting/harvesting also applies to other art forms. It's all about that other plane, that other dimension: unlock the door with the key of your imagination. Like the Twilight Zone.
Do not attempt to adjust your set...
...oh, no, wait, that's the Outer Limits
