I write about songwriting so often because songwriting is the only thing that I have ever truly cared about. I have never written a song for no reason. Every song carries the fingerprint of a moment that once lived and breathed inside me: an experience, an emotion, an infatuation, a desire, a disappointment, a regret, a triumph, an argument with the world, an argument with myself, a relationship that flourished or failed, a belief I clung to or abandoned. Sometimes it was nothing more than the excitement of a clever phrase arriving at exactly the right moment like an unexpected guest at the door for some word-play. . Every song has had a life before it became a recording. For years, they were written entirely by hand. I still have binders filled with lyrics scratched out by my teenage right hand long before computers became part of the process. Around 2006, Word documents and Blogger replaced notebooks and loose paper, but the impulse remained exactly the same: catch the feeling befor...