Musician

There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.

Music was very influential on me as a kid.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too.

You can't write if you don't read.

I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it's not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

Every country that's ever been the most powerful country in the world ceases to be the most powerful country in the world at some point.

I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.

My spiritual system is 12-step programs. That's the only one I've ever had. I didn't have one before that.

I'm from Texas. I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was 19 years old, and it is really beautiful in Tennessee.

If there is such a thing as a workaholic, I'm it, and that's what passes for leisure.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

I don't really think in terms of obstacles. My biggest obstacle is always myself.

I don't usually read reviews.

You know, I'm not comfortable with people whose politics are static in a democracy.

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.