The term "genius" gets used far too loosely in rock & roll.

Let's just say I'm like a ship passing through storms, resting in ports now and then until it's time to continue the journey. I once told a friend, `I'm just looking for an angel with a broken wing - one that couldn't fly away.'

I can only listen to what I'm working on, at the time. I can't listen to anything else because I don't want to copy it.

My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.

I had another idea of getting a traveling medicine wagon with a dropdown side and traveling around England. That might sound crazy to you, but over there it's so rural you can do it. Just drop down the side and play through big battery amps and mixers and it can all be as temporary or as permanent as I want it to be.

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing.

When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there's a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go.