Guns are part of the American psyche, aren’t they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change.
When I’m singing “Deanna,” for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.
I don’t really care who collects my work, black, white, red, yellow. You have to also be consciously aware of, what does this mean in your home? And how are you supporting this work and the message behind the work?
Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.
I have things that I’m interested in, and I’m not really interested in writing about anything that I’m not interested in. But it’s important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.
It’s very important that the music has a sense of adventure to it, and that it’s done by the seat of your pants. There’s a kind of nervy element about it.
Moving to the country is a very bold thing to do. You can have vague romantic notions about doing that, but in actuality, it can be a terrifying thing.
