I was deluding myself that the song was almost not important, but I think the real thing that was happening was almost like self-hypnosis or mediation. The guitar lick was the transcendental key that unlocked my brain. It freed me. And then it all became easy. It's funny now, because I've had times when it wasn't easy.

On Eye of the Zombie, I had so-called studio musicians.

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.

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.

You got to hidey-hide, you got to jump and run again. You got to hide-hidey-hide, the old man is down the road.

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.

You should play with real musicians; the best music comes from real people interacting with each other.