I don't go into any album with a concept or a deliberate direction. It's more letting the best music that really appeals to me at the time, the best songs that I find after many months and years of search and sifting through my collection, and asking radio people and journalists. It's really an ongoing search that's as much daunting as it is somewhat exciting.

Finding great songs is the hard part of my gig - it's not as hard as songwriting, that's much more daunting - but I love playing other people's music.

Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

The challenge of course is in sobriety and that's been the blessing, to realize, to take accountability for the ways that your own thinking impacts your happiness, and your serenity, and your ability to be a productive and a loving, giving member of your family and society.

Jazz and blues fests are everywhere now, and Americana is going strong on college radio. What I'm hearing is an appreciation of real music.

With slide guitar, you're just hanging this piece of glass on your hand. It's a really beautiful instrument in that it's so responsive, you're just slipping your hand back and forth.

The connection between toxicity and cancer and safe air and water and food, all of that was important all along, as were women's and human rights issues, but the nuke issue and the safe energy movement became really important to me in the mid-'70s.