If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

Mama, put my guns in the ground, I can't shoot them anymore. That long black cloud is coming down.

It may look like I'm moving but I'm standing still.

The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed.

When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud, I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.

They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives, put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs, or their wives.

[In 1951] we were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real.