Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.

Music doesn't tell you where to go. It says, go find your own place. That's what it told me.

If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with.

When you`re onstage you have a certain faith that somebody's gonna yell somethin' back. Some nights it's louder than other nights and some nights they do, and on some songs they don't. But that's the idea. I think when you begin to expect a reaction from an audience, it's a mistake.

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy.

So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes, is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

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.