We need to have faith in the people who are giving this movement direction to be smart enough to stay one step ahead of what's coming up next.

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins.

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.

I don't think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.

If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

I wasn't popular in school, I was Mexican, I was all these inappropriate things. I started playing the ukulele and taking it to school, and I realized people liked listening to it. I would play it to comfort myself at home, and I'd play rhythm and blues songs that had four chords. That's how it started.