Your legs were heaven, your breasts were the alter, your body was the holy land.

I hadn't performed by myself in a while. It feels very natural to me, and I assume people come for the very same reasons as they do when I'm with the band: to be moved, for something to happen to them.

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life. And perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree. I was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous.

Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.

And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.