There's tons of anger and angst and peculiarity and eccentricity, and good towns know that that's okay. But towns that are kind of bullshit don't know what to do with all those feelings.

They preach that I should save the world. They pray that I won't do a better job of it.

I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

I am one of those sort of "lesser" types, those sensitive types, those people who wouldn't have made it on their own if other people hadn't helped them. A straightforward capitalist society would've cut them off and let them die. So I was saved by my friends and by my family and by people who cared about me, and by modern psychotherapy that cared about women.

If a war has to happen, a war has to happen.

There was a lot of distance between the Dar of The Honesty Room and the Dar of Mortal City, so there was no attempt.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"