When people ask me what 'American Pie' means, I tell them it means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to.

I'm living in a world that was created a hundred years ago with vaudeville and people traveling around and medicine shows and things and making live music on stage and I'm still doing that. I like it that way. I like to present something to people that's had 40 years of being honed and perfected. It's something that you're not going to find with an artist who's been around for two or three years, or even ten years.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living. In an earthly tapestry hung from the skyline of smoldering cities so gray and so vulgar, as not to be satisfied with their own negativity, but needing to touch all the living as well.

I am what I do, and that's partly why I don't want to give up singing. But when I can't sing well, I will.

Over the years I've had more and more of an association with Nashville.

There we were all in one place, a generation lost in space.

Hills of forest green where the mountains touch the sky, a dream come true, I'll live there til I die.