Lennon's was one of the first voices I emulated when I began to sing. When we held tryouts in my pal's dad's living room for the singer in our band, I sang a Beatles song that Lennon sang. There is something about the timbre of his voice, something that it conveys, that still gets to me. The quality and the poetry of his lyrics. The wry sense of humor. And the boyishness, in the beginning. There are a great many things that touch me about him... Lennon was, to put it in his own words, a 'working-class hero.'

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.

I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, don't look back, you can never look back.

I said, baby, do you have no shame? She just looked at me, uncomprehendingly, like cows at a passing train.

No one in this country need go hungry, and alleviating the problem is primarily a matter of readjusting our priorities. In both the government and the private sector, self-interest has displaced the ideal of community that made this country great. The old world view of "us, we, our" has been replaced by "I, me, mine." The reasons for this are manifold and complex, but at the end of the day, we need to remember that, if one of us is suffering needlessly, all of us are diminished.

An angry man can only get so far until he reconciles the way he thinks.

Selling eight million copies of your first album will mess you up.