If I start to feel bored or blocked or frustrated with something, I’m comfortable walking away. When I was younger, I pushed through or forced it… but in the last five or six years, I’ll literally close a session and be like, “I’ll go back to this in a day or in a week or two weeks.” The second I give it space, I tend to feel more motivated to go back into it.

I know what you mean, but there are two kinds of voids, the one that you work with and the one that you bear. I work with and try to generate a void. I pick up the guitar and I let my mind wander until it gets distracted and suddenly it lost its purpose. It’s just wondering between one chord and the other, one subject or the other, or maybe I would just be distracted watching a film and something moves me, or the light in the window and then I let that feeling guide me. I always use this metaphor. It’s like getting into a garden at night and suddenly perceiving a perfume of a tree or a flower. You don’t know exactly where it’s coming from, but you know there’s something there, so you start sniffing around until you find it. You get closer and closer to the source until you identify it. That’s the way I write. What I mean is that suddenly something crosses my mind and I just follow that. I try not to lead at the beginning. I try to follow and then whenever I find that I take, I use reason and I organize. I say, “Wait, I need a second part with the same structure. I need a bridge. I need a chorus. Let’s go. Let’s move to this place. Let’s change this rationally,” but the core has to be subconscious.

If by the second or third day I’m stuck and it’s not working, I usually will scrap it. I find an open tuning and start picking around until I find a melody or something I like. I follow that melody to the end of the song. I have to be willing to scrap the entire thing and move on because I can’t waste a lot of time. Everyone has a different approach with writing, this long excursion, excavating out of the ground, like you’re digging and finding it can be this long process. For me it’s more like following a bird. If it flies away too quickly, it just wasn’t meant to be.

If I start to feel stagnant, going to see a good show always helps. Watching a great band makes me want to play music. Like, when we opened for Queens of the Stone Age a few years back. I was unsure where I wanted to go next musically, and had a feeling, like maybe I should do another acoustic album… I was starting to put some invisible pressure on myself instead of letting my instincts lead. But after a couple nights of watching Queens play these rock ‘n’ roll songs that have been my favorites for years, it was like, “No, fuck that, I want to play heavy music and let some aggression out,” so then I started working on Abyss .

I would have tried to meet Lou Reed backstage. I went to see him for years, and never tried to meet him. Eventually we met at award shows and did become friends.

It feels like a yearning but also a kind of overwhelming glowing out.

A death threat at Glastonbury festival in 1989. The police told me not to go on, but I said I had to because I was headlining. So I wore a bullet-proof vest. It seemed unlikely that I would be assassinated, but it was shocking and very stressful.

Hormones – other than that, I sleep like a rock.

An astronaut, a writer, a dancer.

Ten more closets: I am a hoarder.