Singing someone else's songs is like keeping your clothes on.

When I had a child, everyone was telling me that I was going to see the world through her eyes, and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it. I kept waiting for that to happen, and thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn't.

You feel that no matter what's said in the music or how pointed it may get, the most you can wish for is that it plants a few seeds.

If I'm not on tour or in the studio, I'm in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It's not lost on me that it's a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature.

Do you force your kids to pay attention to what's going on, or do you let them live their lives outside of it? My hope is that my child is a strong activist. That would make me most proud.

I get really worried, like if they say, 'Take vocal lessons,' or something because it's kind of like I used to really love to draw when I was a kid and then I took like an art class - because everyone said, 'Oh, you're so good, you should take a class and maybe you can be really good,' and then I went to the class and then they showed me how to use a ruler and perspective and all this stuff and it totally made me not want to do it at all.

When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn't play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.