Writing was my godsend, my treatment, my way of digging myself out of a depressive hole. That’s not an outlet a lot of working-class kids had. But because I’d been exposed to books from an early age, this method came naturally. I’d write lots of poems to expel negative feelings. Though I didn’t show them to anybody—they contained the kind of stuff you’d hesitate to tell even a psychiatrist—they became the seeds for the lyrics that would come to define my career.

