I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town.
What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.
All the songs I write are about human dynamics whether it's with girlfriends boyfriends or family.
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.
In every song I write whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.
And when I was young my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.