I think I was meant to be a musician who speaks his mind about social justice issues. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, but a family that had enough money to buy a $50 guitar and a $50 amplifier, and had a basement to rehearse in. What I think the global human cost of this horrific poverty is how many Mozarts or curers of cancer are slaving away in the Maquiladoras along the Tijuana border, or in the Indonesian sweat shops? There are billions of people who will never become the people they could be, or the people they were meant to be, due to crushing poverty.

I don't want to leave this mess around my children to clean up. I want to swing absolutely as hard as I can to straighten things out before they get to the age where it starts hurting them.

I think you might be considered a terrorist for asking the question! It can be so broadly defined now. And the thing is, you’re not privy to those decisions. Anyone who expresses any opinion can be considered a terrorist.

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

I've always been on a personal mission to save the guitar.

Amazingly talented singer who sang like an angry angel

What is poverty, if not violence. Like, the number of people who die every year from starvation and from hunger and poverty is in the tens of millions.