It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice."

In this society, we don't like to face the future and the dying process and all of it. Most of us really don't want to think about it, but it's facing me in the mirror every day.

I love the lower ranges of my new voice. I really enjoy that. It's a challenge, and I accept the challenge. I sort of enjoy it now to reach notes that maybe four years ago I couldn't reach. I don't mean to grumble about it. I'm past that critical period and have gone on to a whole new field. And we go everywhere. We travel around the world, and I learn songs from every place we go, and it's a joyful process.

We were raised with that discussion about violence and non-violence, and we all pretty much came up on the side of non-violence. That became my foundation with politics and my livelihood.

As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.

If you don't have music, you have silence. There is power in both.

In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.