The most spiritual place you can be in your life is when youre being very real, when youre not allowing everybody and everything to influence your decisions and your moods, and whats morally right or ethically right.

I think we're heading into the Creative Age. We've passed through the Agricultural and then the Industrial and then the Information Age.

A long term goal is to encourage students to start doing concerts in which I or the other artists will come back at the end of the school year to see their concerts.

I want to break the old paradigm of thinking that if you're successful, you have to crash and burn-that all of this won't be there tomorrow.

When I was a kid in Eugene, Oregon, there was this fantastic guitar player who went out on the tables, chairs, out in the audience and played. So I started taking my guitar in the audience. I tripped, fell backwards and ripped my pants.

I quickly learned to take anger and use it to motivate me. My sister ran away from home, and she was my world. And that was that. The guitar became my world.

I've also been writing for other artists, producing other artists, doing some country stuff. Those lyrics I tend to leave more universal.