Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be.

A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. "Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we're going to go support the cannery workers' strike in Watsonville."

A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we're supposed to be saying and doing.

In high school, everybody rapped. You just pounded on the table.

All of a sudden it became that hip hop didn't used to be about partying; hip hop used to be about putting out a message.