Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process.
My emotions are very simple and always have been about the Hall of Fame. It's something that I had absolutely nothing to do with and had no control over, so I never thought much about it, to be frank.
Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.
I pretty much grew up when punk was big in the UK. The Sex Pistols were heroes for me. I used to run around like Johnny Rotten. I had a jacket like his.
Bob Dylan has a way with words that simply blows me away. When he forgets his lyrics he just makes up new ones on the spot, that is what I called talented!
Perhaps areas of Israel where current large Palestinian populations and demographic realities exist could be exchanged for Israeli expansion into the West Bank to include most of East Jerusalem.
You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it's moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks' efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.
My voice hasn't changed really very much. I still do all my songs when I perform live and still do them in the original keys. I've been blessed with that ability to retain that.
It's kind of weird. You can have hits, but it's hard to sustain a career. I went through that period where I didn't have a lot of hits, although people were still buying the records.
I like the songs to appear very simple and to flow by without any kind of hiccup, but there has to be this impression of other currents underneath. Like if the songs aren't, on some level, multidimensional, we lose interest in them.
I remember when I wrote songs when I was about 16, they all sounded the same because I didn't know anything. And all the subject matter was all the same because I hadn't actually done much.
We need to go everywhere. There is not one county in this state, I don't care how far west you go, that doesn't have Democrats. We have to be proud of who we are.
In the UK and the US especially you've got a lot of throwaway artists who have their 40 million dancers and they do their show. There's many artists who would not do a live show because they know they can't.
Benji usually tries to match his hair with his underwear, and you know how he had the pink hair for a while well we caught him in a pink thong one day!
People can say or think whatever they want... so in my reality, it's kind of irrelevant. I'm always the kind of person that does the right thing and keeps my side of the street clean.
My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.
To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.
I need to find a church on Sunday. I need to say 'please' and 'thank you,' 'yes sir' and 'no ma'am.' Do the little things because that's part of being an adult.
It doesn't really matter to me what the rest of country is doing. I'm not caught up in trying to make a record that sounds like everybody else. That, to me, is a record label's absolute biggest downfall.
The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll.
The packaging has to really sell the product today, because kids can go out and buy a CD and then 10 kids can burn them. So you have to really be on your toes.
