I'll tell you what does impress me: the fact that a lot of the cats who were our idols are still out there doing it. That impresses me very much.

The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff... that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture.

I had my eyes closed in the dark, I sighed a million sighs, I told a million lies, to myself, to myself.

It's the emotion...each word has got a connotation and symbolism and the thing is finding what's behind the word-what meaning it has and what emotion. I'm really into vocal repetition as a definite art form.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.

If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dreams, where immobile steel rims crack and the ditch in the back roads stop. Could you find me?

You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.