Black people lived right by the railroad tracks and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.

I also think that what's wrong with all of us is that we don't show enough love toward each other.

I would wear flamboyant clothes and long hair, and most singers at the time didn't.

Greed has taken the whole universe, and nobody is worried about their soul.

I think they saw me as something like a deliverer, a way out. My means of expression, my music, was a way in which a lot of people wished they could express themselves and couldn't.

I'm very much a gentleman in what I do.

I got fame and fortune, and I lost my sense of reasoning.