'but it seems so real'

Look, music is a craft. A lot of what appears to be genuine feeling is more like the application of a technique that I've spent hours drilling. Particularly with the voice. I put this quite well in an essay: 'Real intimacy comes from subtlety and control, and those are skills you can only learn through training.' What most people don't get is that a great guitarist is always an autodidact to some extent; when I say training, I really mean the self-discipline to gut it out. - Love it when people love the songs, but yeah, even the ones that are biographical are essentially some past moment that I'm reproducing. My fear is I'd be like a robot singing my old hits endlessly.