You can't stop us on the road to freedom, you can't stop us cause our eyes can see.

I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can't see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.

If you're with a good band and everybody's from the old school, it's different. When you're in your element, you're in your element and things just come. You don't have to drag them out or force them out. They just happen.

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me.

Somebody's going to hear a song that will key in a nerve or something in their experience that represents their own vision. And the next person is going to see it completely different. So even what it means to me is probably irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. What matters is what it means to each person listening to it.

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

I think I opened up an area with Astral Weeks that hit a lot of peoples' nerves. But you can't really say that they're my favorite songs.