Q: Have you been in therapy about it?
A: No. I think my form of therapy is songwriting. Writing in general. There’s a lot of emotional expression in the music, whether it has words or not.

Q: Isn’t it true that in the studio you and your bandmates weren’t fond of “Just the Way You Are,” your most commercially successful song from The Stranger?
A: We didn’t like it at all. We listened back to it and went, “Eh, that’s a chick song.” It was a little too MOR. We were going to leave it off the album. And then Phoebe Snow came by with Linda Ronstadt and said, “Are you crazy? That is a beautiful song! You’ve got to put that on the album.” They talked us into it. You’ve got to listen to a woman’s point of view. Guys think they know everything, and they don’t.

Q: As the man who wrote "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant", do you have any recommendations?
A: Oh, there’s a great place down on Houston Street called Ballato’s. It’s just a humble place on Houston Street, and the food is made with love. You can taste the love in the food.

Q: What are some warning signs that an Italian restaurant is no good?
A: Well, a bad sign is glop. Too much cheese. Too much garlic. Like the Olive Garden. I’m sorry. I know they’re trying to bring an Italian cuisine to America, but it sucks.

Q: Are there certain books that have had a big influence on your way of thinking over the years?
A: I think the most influential book I’ve ever read was Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.

Q: I don’t know what that is.
A: It was a very risqué book for its time. Basically, it’s a whole treatise on atheism. It’s done as a fairy tale, but it’s really about doubting the existence of a deity. And when I was a kid I always suspected this, and when I read Mark Twain, I said, “Aha! A great writer thinks like this.” It kind of cemented my beliefs. I don’t believe in religion. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve become less concrete in my atheism. There is a spiritual plane that I’m aware of, that I don’t understand, that I believe science may be able to explain someday—or maybe not. But I mean, I’ve actually seen a ghost.

Q: Come on. You’ve seen a ghost?
A: I used to live in East Hampton, and it was an old house that had been renovated, and I was going to bed one night, and I walked into my bedroom and I saw what looked like a woman brushing her hair in front of a mirror. She was very old-fashioned-looking—it looked like a 19th-century woman in a dressing gown. It was quite realistic. It was quite three-dimensional. I wasn’t dreaming. I saw this. It lasted for about a minute, and I said, “Okay, I’m one of those people,” you know? I realized I don’t know everything.