We had a piano in my house when I was growing up, so I played it.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't want to bang on it, I wanted to play songs.  I took some lessons, but often I ignored my teacher.  I played what I wanted, and I played mostly by ear.  
 
Then I picked up the guitar.  Same thing.  When I started writing music, I know that I was less than ten years old because of the house we lived in.  Over the years, I became more and more passionate about writing music.  I was fascinated by the idea that in all of human history, no one else had ever heard these songs before.   Just me.   And so I struggled to preserve somehow the things that I came up with.  
 
First was raw memorization.  Then staff on paper.  Then came the multitrack tape machine.  
Then digital technology, one advance after the other.  When I released Greek Horses in 1997, it was cutting edge to be able to write, perform, record, and engineer every take of every instrument on an entire album, produce a finished CD and release it without a label.  Today, that's old school. But as technology progresses, the product gets better and better.  

My music is difficult to categorize, because it's very diverse and sometimes unorthodox.  I'm not interested in writing a dozen songs in the same style to make a coherent radio-friendly product.  I write what I feel.  It's different every time.  

In the end, I think that's what artistic expression is all about.