When I finish an album and I find myself listening to it in the car because it makes me feel a certain way that's the time to try to let other people know about it.

For my birthday this year my girlfriends - who knew I'd just inherited my dad's turntable - gave me a carton of albums like 'Blue Kentucky Girl ' by Emmylou Harris and 'Off the Wall ' by Michael Jackson. It's all stuff we grew up with. I mean you can't have a music collection without Prince's 'Purple Rain' - it just can't be done!

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs my attitude my creativity and colored them in a way that is unique.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

I use the music to vent and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety stress and depression so that's how the album came out so dark.

United Artists wanted to do records with me. I had no idea what a rare thing that was... to make an album. And they put a guy with me working on songs and I got busy with films. I just kind of let it slide. Isn't that amazing?

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums as a matter of fact because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.

The second album was emotionally exhausting and my life felt like it had become very serious at a very young age.