Richard Thompson on coming back to center, songs that live in the margins, and catching the horse.

Richard Thompson was a teenager when he co-founded the influential British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. In the six decades since, he wrote “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (one of Time magazine's greatest songs ever written), was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, and landed among Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest guitarists. Yet when we asked what holds a working life together, his answers were small and practical: creative mornings before noon, a pile for every song that doesn’t fit, and an imaginary horse he starts catching at ten o’clock on show day. It’s a warm, wry conversation about sobriety since 23, the practice he keeps coming back to, and why “all the good songs are written in the margin.”