I decided at 10 I wanted to be in a band; everyone else wanted to play football.

I decided at 10 I wanted to be in a band; everyone else wanted to play football.

I'm trying to find peace in the world, as it is. I'm feeling this sort of slow stripping of my mind, like the layers of an onion. I'm starting to see through all these little structures that have been imposed on me by my society that tell me how I'm supposed to view my life and the world. What I'm supposed to find to be important and what is not. Sometimes you see through so much of it that you feel like you're just a leaf blowing on the wind.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

I bring a record home, and it connects with me like nothing else. In my ideal situation, somebody will do that with my record.

Typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything comes together in the song.

I went to Louisiana Tech, which is just down the road from where we lived. It was an easy college to get into.