I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?

I let her do some of my laundry and she slipped in a few meals in between, and next thing I remember, she was all moved in.

I'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independent”s Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.

People know more about baseball players contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our childrens lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, Do you want to bring a child into this world? Thats pretty dire.

The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we'll fill in the missing numbers in each others paint-by-numbers dreams.