Manhattan Fault Line: Every song is written in a different way. Sometimes you hear a riff. Sometimes it's a title. Sometimes you're in a room with someone and collaborate in an interesting way, hearing a new sound or style that kick starts your own excitement. It's never the same-it would be boring if it was.

But writing "Manhattan Fault Line" was a pretty unique experience for me. I was fooling around with the Mac program Garageband and digging all of the various loops. I found an acoustic guitar loop that absolutely hypnotized me. I just let it run and fell into a near-dream state and the whole song just came to me.

The sound of that loop was like some kind of mantra that acted like a non-human collaborator, just setting me free to riff on all kinds of things. You can hear it in the song-it's a rumination on earthquakes, geography, uprooting your life and moving to another city and then daring to tear down and dismantle everything around you just to see how you'll be changed and transformed by the experience.

All that from a 2-chord acoustic guitar loop. It was really an interesting way of writing. And I have no guilt or hesitation about putting my name on a song that began from an acoustic guitar strummed by some guy I'll never know (I even used the loop in the recording of the song). I've always loved the "readymade" method of making art. Now, this is far from Duchamp's urinal. I still had to write the melody and the words and arrange the damn thing. But it was liberating to get the germ of the whole thing from outside of myself.

And it's one of my 4 or 5 favorite songs I've ever written. Hmmmm, maybe it's time to open up that Garageband program again.