If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

I used to - my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.