Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music.

Fame, on its best day, is kind of like a friendly wave from a stranger by the side of the road. And when it's not so good, it's like a long walk home, all alone, with nobody in when you get there.

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.

I was in my late 20s, in the process of shaping my musical outlook and what I wanted it to be about, when I first encountered Woody Guthrie.

I had tried to go to college, and I didn't really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble, and I was hounded off the campus - I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.

They put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the Yellow man.

Baby, this town rips the bones from our back it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We got to get out while we're young.