The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.

What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.

Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

Empires are doomed. They become more diffuse, more broke, demagogues rule, and so I was just pointing out some similarities between past empires and what's going on right now. They all have had to apply more and more harsh rhetoric of superiority and divine right to justify the building of hegemony.

You know how people say they're either like a cat or a dog? I feel like a cat. I just want to be alone. Isn't that weird? It's a lot to take in.