I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

I’m not all about money, but, like most musicians, I am about survival.

I'm just wearing regular street clothes. Pretty much all the time. In the summertime, or when it gets warm out, shorts and sandals or something like that. Stuff that I don't mind getting a little sweaty.

Punk. . .was more a kind of do-it-yourself, anyone-can-do-it attitude. If you only played two notes on the guitar, you could figure out a way to make a song out of that, and that's what it was all about.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.