"I try to go through life with my ears unplugged. I’m always listening for the spare parts out of which I can stick a song together: the raggedy rhythm of speech, two words falling in love, a strange rhyme, the bare bones of a story. I’ve gotten a lot of my best lines and songs that way."

He will even go through a new song and replace a perfect rhyme with a near one. Hudson River New York Upstate Waltz: On the surface, this is an exercise in how far a rhyme can go and still be considered a near-rhyme, and a song of lost love.