The songs that I like are the ones that you can’t visualize, that are just cries from the heart – those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.
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’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.
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?
I love rock-n-roll. I think it’s an exciting art form. It’s revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.
The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don’t have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.
I’m not in the business of telling people what to do. I’m much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.
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.
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.
