I was playing heavy metal when I was 18. I had to evolve out of that into an alternative consciousness about what it meant to change the way I played guitar, and the kind of songs, and the subject matter, and singing about child abuse, and all this stuff. I had to come from somewhere, and I had to take chances to do that.

Heavy metal is a universal energy -- it's the sound of a volcano. It's rock, it's earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand.

I look at other members of my generation who have basically done one thing, and one thing well, and have been handsomely rewarded for it.

My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.

You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.

There's something going on right now in America, where the American spirit or character is reasserting itself around liberty. I think it's an important time, and I'm trying to document that as an artist. If I just filter what I read through the media, if I just go through what I read through the media, I'm not really in touch with the world I grew up in. I know there's a gap there, I talk to my relatives, I talk to people I meet traveling around, and their mind is on something completely different.

It's wonderful to read interviews by old blues guys - they talk about all their influences, they talk about who taught them how to play, and who they saw, and how they were determined to play that way.