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.

My songs have always had hope and perseverance in them - I never write songs that have no escape hatch, no positivity.

To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.

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

Of course, I came up around music and fame, but this is still my first time experiencing it all. I'm still going through it like anybody else goes through it. But I'm still doing something I've never done before.

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.

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.