I wanna make stuff that sonically sounds really good. I don't wanna make a song about how people think I'm this when I'm really that. I don't wanna m….

Sometimes the teacher would tell me that if you're singing a love song and you just don't feel it with a person or something you've experienced, just….

I think the difference between a good song and a great song is... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid t….

A song like "Walkabout", it's totally imitative. The goal of that song was to make people happy, and I've never really made a song to make people hap….

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on ….

Speaking of stage freight. I was terrified! It was in NOLA at an all ages show. I was wearing Jeans, a Van Halen t-shirt, and a bandana on my neck. O….

I feel the reasons my songs might seem dark is because of how I viewed the situations I was in and it was just something I always felt like documenti….

Sometimes, I write '60s or '80s style pop songs..

The whole of life itself expresses the blues. That's why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, ….

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs..

I wrote the Brotherhood song for no money out of my deep feelings about humanity, and because I was flattered that whatever talents I had, had been r….

I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don't catch fl….

A lot of my songs are about death and the fleetingness of life. It just feels good to remind myself about that a lot. For whatever reason. And it's a….

Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs..

Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain..

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a l….

The songs worked as a different kind of rhetoric, one that could reach the fence-sitters..

Technically, I've been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turne….

It's the singer not the song that makes the music move along..

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics..

I'm a good collaborative writer. I can usually come in and add a couple lines to something, and add a riff or a B-section, or a bridge that will tie ….