The reason music became so powerful to our generation is that it's art you can consume in your car, and we were driving around a lot.

Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political "Copperhead Road" is isn't listening very well.

My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.

You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.

Bob Dylan emerged from nowhere, like an alien. And that was just the start.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.

When I write something simple I'm always really proud of it. When you write something that simple with that much air in it and the whole premise behind it is something pretty obvious - that everybody wants to be happy and free - the song is sort of an exercise in not forgetting that's what you really want and what you really need. We can get caught up in a lot of other stuff.