You can't start a fire Worrying 'bout your little world falling apart This gun's for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark

Sometimes I do an automatic songs, songs that you don't really think about, or work on. You just look back and it sorta surprises you.

The music is pretty relentless. You've got to find some way of letting the audience breathe for a minute, give them a little bit of air - but not too much. Otherwise it would get real intense. The room would get very tense.

By the time I was 19, my parents weren't very authoritative over my life.I didn't have any doubt about that - at that time about what I was going to do or where I was going. I was a musician. I was going to play. I had a band. We were going to make enough money to survive on.

Deindustrialization that I have written about for 40 years left a good part of the American public behind.

[The Catholic religion] was something I carried with me, never forgot, brought into my music. And it's been in my music ever since.

I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18.