You’ve chosen “The Bells” as your favorite lyric . . .

Yeah. I’ve always been very affected by it. And as I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me.

So does the subject of the lyric change for you in retrospect?

Sure. Later on I find out what it was really about. Lots of times I’ll think it’s about one thing and as I get a little distance from it—and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years—it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely.

It happens especially onstage. Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize “God—listen to what this is about. I can’t believe that I said this in public.”

Some of the lyrics that you’ve mentioned are really incredibly personal, and pretty accurate—so obviously so that it’s always kind of funny, over the years, people continuously asking me, “Are these things based on reality?” I thought it was so obvious that they were.

You’ve said in the past that you started out wanting to try and bring the sensibility of the novel to the rock and roll single . . .

That was always the idea behind it. There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can’t survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist’s eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too.

Sometimes some songs take years to get right. You do it and you just know it’s not right and you can’t get it right so you leave it. I think you can only do your best with it and sometimes your best isn’t good enough. At which point you have to give it a rest. Because then you start doing really strange things to it. And when it starts going that far astray it’s time to go away from it.

Do you notice much difference between doing the public readings, and doing the concerts?

The guys aren’t there: there’s no band. On the other hand the humor in the lyrics is much more obvious. And some of the edge in the lyrics is also a lot more obvious . . .

I’ve got a new album out right now and there’s a song called “Harry’s Circumcision,” which you can take in a couple of ways. And one of the ways is that it’s funny. I think I get classified in the black humor section . . . which I don’t really think is true, myself.

Who made the video of “What’s Good”?

Isn’t that something? Isn’t that just something? He’s so great. He’s the guy who took the cover photo . . .

Matt Mahurin? It looked like his work. He really brought out the humor of the song’s imagery. “Mayonnaise soda,” “seeing eye chocolate” . . .