People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for [ trans rights ], and that's why we're seeing this push back. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.