“Writing ‘Love On The Weekend’ was the experience of all the best songs I’ve ever written, when you’re going to go home and obsess all night because you know you’re onto something and you know it’s only going to get better when you go back and work on it the next day.” - RS 2017
“I love you, but I know you enough to predict what you will say if I do certain things. If I made a studio version of In Your Atmosphere, you guys would all say the live acoustic version was better. So I'm just not doing it.” — IG live, 2018
"I used to love writing a song and going out to dinner. That is the greatest feeling in the world. Taking a walk because you know you have a song and you're going to come back after dinner and finish that bridge." — Berklee seminar, 2008
"What might not be obvious about 'Battle Studies' is that it is a concept album. There’s a sadness that runs through all the tunes in the same sort of way." — Guitar World, 2010
“Battle Studies is that feeling between 10PM and 2AM when you have this wild level of arousal and optimism. It’s about the things people do to each other during those hours.” — Playboy interview, 2010
“My Stupid Mouth is probably the most emotionally autobiographically song that I've ever written. Every year before school started I said, this is gonna be the year that I'm gonna go to school and be quiet. […] And I could never do it.” — Inside the Square documentary, 2001
“One of the great feminist moments in my life was when I found out that Samus Aran was actually a woman! I thought that was, to me, a real primer on living a modern integrated life.” — IG live, 2017
The chorus to "Atlantic City" by Bruce Springsteen comes to mind a lot. Also Eddie Vedder wrote "are you woman enough to be my man?" https://t.co/OfR6OB0jXa
“Two reasons I played [Free Fallin’] the way that I played it was because it was really late at night and I'm a good neighbor. […] And also I can't sing that high, the way the chorus goes.” — Live performance, 2022
“The Paramore song ‘Forgiveness’ is so good because it breathes, pitch-wise. Like, it moves around. And that doesn't make someone a bad singer, it makes someone a great singer.” — IG live, 2017
I came to the end of the idea that made me, and was about to destroy me. So I️ shut it down. The record was made from behind the curtain. https://t.co/UsDYoxv2wy
“I started the John Mayer Trio. Because of that exploration, I was able to come back in the studio and learn fully to take the guitar and writing side and put them together the best I've ever done so far.” - Berklee seminar, 2008
“Before we had a phrase ‘cuffing season,’ there was a song called ‘St. Patrick's Day,’ which was about cuffing season. […] I would say there’s job security in the holidays.” — Podcast with Kerwin Frost, 2021
"I got to Mac [Miller]’s house and he played me this thing he had just worked on that morning, and I went, 'Give me a guitar. I’m in.'" - Complex Magazine, 2018
“[Daughters] is a song about people being affected by stuff that's got nothing to do with you, even though you take it on as your personal challenge to fix people. Cause everybody loves somebody in repair.” — Live performance, 2003
“[Eminem] is a guy who writes lyrics with quadruple entendres. […] Imagine writing a paragraph, but that paragraph has to read and make sense across, down, and diagonal. As hard as it is to make that paragraph is as talented as Eminem is.” — IG live, 2018