Back then I was still listening to rhythm and blues, and my aunt took me to see a Pete Seeger concert. And it gelled. He made all the sense in the world to me. I got addicted to his albums, and then Belafonte and Odetta - they were the people who seemed to fuse things that were important to me into music. I think Pete the most because he did what he did to the point where he took those enormous risks and then paid for them.

"Nasty Man" isn't a laughing matter, but you have to laugh anyway. The song, itself, becomes something of a laughing matter because we'd go crazy if we didn't keep laughing.

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.

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.

All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?

If you swing both ways, you really swing. I just figure you double your pleasure.

I think I would have had an easier time of it if I had had training much earlier. Because when I got to the training, it was in my late 30s and I already probably had every bad habit a singer could have. In fact, it still goes on. It's un-training those habits and retraining new ones - the breathing, the relaxation, the tongue, the lungs, the everything.