Sometimes our significant others travel with us.

I guess it's a bit like not claiming your brother at school. This kind of disowning of the thing that you're most like. You want to be something cool, like Michael Jackson say, with a boom box over your shoulder and wearing leather. But you know deep down you're just a hayseed.

We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.

I didn't grow up on the porch of a cabin looking out over the 90 acres that the mule was plowing with Paw-Paw playing the banjo. But I was always interested in folk music.

Because music gets you high, so it makes sense to sing about what else gets you high.

It's not very long ago that we were all singing country music. And country music is equally black as it is white and that's important to recognize.

It’s bound to be one hell of a steel wheelin, railroadin good time…while the western country rolls by and the smoke rises blacker than musical notes pouring out of that stoked-up-and-chuggin iron chariot.