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I get asked quite often about why I have references to the lord in my music. I’ve never been and will never be religious, but as soon as you have a conversation about Jesus, you know what you’re talking to him about: how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals. Like on my new album, with the line, “help me, Jesus”— you know I’m not asking for help fixing the fucking car. You know there’s a certain place you’ll get to before you’ll ask for that kind of help. It’s like an immediate shorthand to the nature of the song. I would maintain that most of the gospel references in music— aside from gospel music plain and pure— have got little or nothing to do with the church. The church might say that as soon as you turn it into a popular-music thing, you devalue it. But in an odd way, it becomes so much more powerful. How can the church own music anyway?

I always thought my references to the lord and Jesus came from gospel music. But then I realized the other day that, in doo-wop music, the lyrics to those songs tend to be like, “I pray to the lord above, he sent me an angel.” All that lyrical content that I’ve always thought came from the Staple Singers is all in groups like Dion & the Belmonts, the Dixie Nightingales, the Chantels— the whole thing is built around that. Sometimes you just say things really simply in songs, like the way children write. People are like, “Don’t say that, it’s too simplistic, it’s too embarrassing.” Most people try to be more eloquent, or cleverer with language, but it cuts deeper because you’ve said it simply.