I'm the kind of person that, as a listener, will go the extra mile to interpret something that's fairly meaningless, or that might be meaningless.

The fact of picking up an instrument and writing a song and expressing yourself publicly has a powerful political dimension.

I think there's been this long cycle of the big companies making a lot of money by underestimating people's intelligence and people are used to it now. So, they're so used to having their intelligence underestimated that, for most of them, it really isn't worth the bother of paying a little more attention to something that might hit them on a deeper level. But you can't really read people's minds.

I worry about financial security, and the older I get the more I worry about it.

I think, then, there's the sort of, like, political dimension to lyrics. One of the problems that I've had with my output as a lyric writer is that I look back at it and there's some turn-of-phrases and some images and some kind of montage-y kinds of things I'm really proud of. But it kind of bums me out that people have told me again and again that they don't really understand what I'm trying to say.

I'm an atrocious business man, because it's just not the way I think about things. And that's pretty much what all that Grammy/MTV kind of stuff is tied into.

When I run across something that feels like a real eye-opener, it's gonna have an influence on me forever.