I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.
I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.
I think it surprises a lot of people that I’m still around, you know, still – that I’m not pushing up daisies, as they say.
Bruce Springsteen’s a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I’m a folk musician. Honestly, I think that’s true.
I was a functional addict.
I was in chemical jail.
I’m looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!
If I were to try to identify a turning point I’d say that was it – getting clean.
I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar – a real nice one – in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.
When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity.
It’s hard to find a way forward. When you’re 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly.
Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do.
I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend But I always thought that I’d see you again.
There ain’t no doubt in my mind that love is the finest thing around.
Shower the people you love with love Show them the way that you feel Things are gonna work out fine if you only will.
Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I’m like and I don’t really know myself, so how can I tell them?
One of my earliest memories was me singing ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next room. I didn’t even realise she was there. I was terribly embarrassed.
I think that we’re all totally isolated beings and always will be.
I think that American music, for me, it’s a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.