Folk music is not for a select group of people who feel that maybe he taught them about this music and that it belongs to them. It doesn't belong only to them. It belongs to everyone who's interested in the blueprints of good songwriting.

I relate more to the descendants of Galileo Galilei and the Wright brothers than I do to anyone else you might mention. If you could name someone working today who I could relate to, I'd be both surprised and thrilled.

Artists are not going to put somebody new in the president's chair. It's all worth the effort; it all needs to be done. But I don't look at songwriting as having the ability to necessarily do that today.

Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

I'm waiting for my kids to grow up and get into the Offspring and look at me like I'm a total candy-ass.

I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively-and there were a lot of choices-writing songs was king.

The songs I write should only be gauged by what other writers or peers are doing today. If the barometer for all songwriters was to match his body of work, then anyone you might mention alive or dead is a failure. But I've learned to not be too hung up on what's fair or not fair.