I'm not comfortable as a lead singer. Maybe I could do it in the studio, but I wouldn't have the confidence to play shows.

It's always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don't pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once.

I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work.

The truth is that I don't work any harder than anyone else in the world. I don't work 18-hour days. I don't stay up until 4 in the morning trying to finish a line.

It would probably be better if I got involved in fewer things just because I'd have more time to write for my own purposes... But if somebody calls you up with a really cool project, it's hard to just say 'no' because you don't feel like working.

I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook.

Really, music is what I'm interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing.

I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.

I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.

I am not very regimented unless I have to be. I wish I was someone that could just write every day, but I tend to work on specific projects for a specific period of time and then stop.