You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.

I'm writing about what's happening to me now. I mean, I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. I have a song about that. And why wouldn't you? It strikes me that that was a huge event. It's kind of funny and horrible and interesting, so why wouldn't one write about that?

It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.

In a way, the songs are written to be performed. I put them on records, but I'm always thinking about how an audience would react to it. I realized at age 7 that I wanted to be a performer, and I used to do that, and occasionally I'll get an acting job. I don't really make much of a living as an actor, but it's fun to do it when I get a job.

Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school.

My father writings stuff was always his personal stuff, like about the day we had to put our dog down, or finding old photographs of his father, or passing a guy he went to boarding school with on a street in New York. Very specific, detailed, descriptive columns that he wrote. I think in a way, it could be argued that my best songs are that way too. They're almost journalistic in that they're very clear, and very specific, and they describe things.

After a war, after a concentration camp, I find it's not too difficult to be happy.