I spent a year pulling all-nighters and driving around in a really tiny fuel-efficient car relying on the kindness of strangers and seeing this incredible range of landscapes throughout the United States. That's what happened with The Honesty Room. It was a huge night and day switch.

I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.

I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, "Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don't want to cover up the song."

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.

"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

But where do we come up with this notion of a woman in which the less space you take up, the more you're worth?

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.