“To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.”

If you’re able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.

In folk music, I’ve always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don’t know anything about the characters, you don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing something important. I love that. I’m really a sucker for that kind of song.

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times.

It’s much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

Right now, America is under the gun. It’s being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.

Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically.

If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.

We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

Blah, blah, blah. What’s a crime? What’s criminality? What can you do, what can’t you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn’t really make sense.

The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.

I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

See, there’s only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that – the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.

We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

A lot of my cartoon voices are basically just variations on my natural voice.

I guess if people all followed the basic principles of their own religions, they would love everybody instead of hating half the world.

Punk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded.

And playing them really sloppy. Keeping it very basic-and using only a few notes-and playing slowly with perfect rhythm is a task in itself.

I was literally reduced to basic breath and blinks while she inhabited my vessel and told her story through me.

I couldn’t think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.