Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small.

Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

I am so disconnected from the world of rock 'n' roll. I was always peripheral, partly because of the drug culture. I was not involved in that.

The white music was melodic and pretty, and you had beautiful women's voices like Gogi Grant and even the Andrews Sisters. Then I went directly to rhythm and blues, which had beautiful voices but not much melody in particular and pretty much the same chord pattern. I loved it, I was entrenched in it, but then folk music came in the middle of that for me, and made its own path. And it was part of the rebellion against bubblegum music, or music that is pretty but doesn't say anything.