Collaborating with the musical genius of our time in some ways with Prince himself - late, great Gerald Levert,all these are forms of singing education, what the Greeks call paideia,that deep education to get us to shift from superficial things to serious things, to shift from bling-bling to life and death to justice and pain and joy, those fundamental, elemental things that we must come to terms with as we make our moves from our mother's womb to the tomb.

Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That's why we have to bear witness. That's why we have to be so public about it, and that's why we can't just play footsie with it.

The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.