And my voice now is a struggle, it's a daily struggle to keep it up. Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day.

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

I'm not a rock and roller, a hitmaker. I'm highly dependent on what's coming out of these vocal cords.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.