It's important to have a life and spend time outside of those things [music and politics], in order to appreciate what you've achieved as far as just spending time with people you love, and doing things like painting.

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.

Music saved me; I mean, my upbringing was like a hurricane, and music was the tree I held onto.

I didn't respond to the kind of sarcastic tone. It felt like some of the Sarah Palin speech was written as though it were a Saturday Night Live newscast. Maybe that's because she looks very similar . . . She's got her Tina Fey thing going.

No music is going to stop the war. What's going to stop the war is a large amount of body bags, or a large amount of people in the streets, protesting it before it starts.

Playing music for as long as I had been playing music and then getting a shot at making a record and at having an audience and stuff, it's just like an untamed force... a different kind of energy.

I'd like people to be educated on the voting machines, making sure that our democracy isn't being hijacked by computer technology. There's no reason there can't be a paper trail on those machines.