That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all.

When I made Blue Moon Swamp, there was a lot of trial and error; I was trying to find people who would be simpatico with my style, and with what I had in mind for the album.

Now that I'm older, I like almost anything that's done well, even surf music and instrumentals; I really enjoyed the interviews with the Ventures in your magazine.

All these different groups of people that are put right in the path of billions of dollars of American tax payers' money. If I had enough time I could have named all of those people [in the song], too! The song would have been 400 minutes long.

When the bad stuff was really intense in my life, it was really what you would call writer's block. Your facility is just not as good because you feel so bad. I've heard of people right on the verge of suicide coming up with some of their best work. I wish I could think of an example, other than Van Gogh, perhaps!

I'm now comfortable playing a lot of the old songs, and I've gotten out a lot of the old equipment.

For years I walked around with the phrase "Green River" because I had seen that on a soda fountain drink when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, and I went, 'Gee, I like that.' Another one was "Lodi", which I thought sounded really cool. I got this cheap little empty plastic notebook at my local drugstore, and bought a little slab of filler paper and the very first title I wrote in it was "Proud Mary". I had no idea what that title meant.