The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune.

You can hide beneath the covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain. Waste your summer praying in vain, for a savior to rise from these streets.

There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.

It's time to impeach the president and get a man in there to get us out of this mess.

Somebody who can reckon with the past, who can live with the past in the present, and move towards the future - that's fabulous.

But the star thing I can live with. The music I can't live without. And that's how it lays out for me, you know. I got as big an ego and enjoy the attention.

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.