I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.

Control success before it controls you.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

[My grandfather -a miner] had black lung, and he didn't talk about it much. It's almost like a combat veteran. But he witnessed some horrific things.

It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.

[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.