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

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

I have a certain pool of subject matter that I like to write about, things that interest me: politics, religion, ecology, and relationships between men and women. And that's usually what I focus on.

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.

So much time weeping and wailing and shaking our fists, creating enemies that really don't exist.

I'm blessed with a pretty good voice. So just sitting back there banging on the tubs wasn't enough.