Patti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.

Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate.

For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.

I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my - my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolf once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.

I heard a political message in rock music. A liberation message. A message of freedom. I heard it in Elvis' voice.