Because we lived in the presence of the church and the convent and the rectory and the school 24-7. And this was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers.

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

I think you can't demonize somebody that's on the other side of the political spectrum, or you can't generalize about them.

I took a month long vacation in the stratosphere, and you know it's very hard to hold your breath.

What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.

Most of these - most people's stage personas are created out of the flotsam and jetsam of their internal geography.

I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.