If you’re really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.
I think it’s very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don’t talk about. That’s why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits.
I don’t want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn’t bear to end up like Elvis Presley in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.
I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I’m tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.
I always think it’s better to be not taking drugs or drinking or anything. That’s not saying I’ve never done it because I have. But I sort of learned I think after a while there has been – it didn’t take me that long to realize that it wasn’t a good thing.
I don’t really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn’t really worry me even if it’s like out of place. At least it’s relevant.
The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.
I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.
