I have a sordid past.

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.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

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

It's just that you don't have to bring it to every stage. You can do a fundraiser for people that you support. You don't necessarily have to talk about one thing or another when you're on your own.

Everyone has to decide how they're going to appear in their lives, how they're going to put themselves out there to the world.

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.