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.

Doomsday is quite within our reach, if we will only stretch for it.

I have a song called "Men." I mean, manhood and trying to be one, and failing as one, and trying to be a husband and a father, and failing at that. I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.

Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.

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.

Who was that fatman buried in your place? Just another imitator, plastic surgeons did his face.

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.