My family could only afford to get me the box of eight Crayola crayons, but I craved the one with all 24 colours. I wanted magenta and turquoise and silver and gold.
I’m not a pitiable creature. It’s just that I suffer very eloquently.
You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit’s foot of their particular religion. You don’t really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.
Buddy Holly and the early rock ‘n’ roll was no lighter than the way I play. It’s very minimal.
I had made all these rules for myself: I’m not writing social commentary, I’m not writing love songs.
An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.
I learned from admiration and osmosis.
America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.
My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.
Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It’s a bad time to be right.
I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.
Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn’t know what she was singing about.
There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.
Eventually, with success, I started to feel more and more isolated – like I didn’t have a community of artists.
For the first time in my career, I’m working in a fine-arts arena, so I’m finally getting some intelligent reviews.
Fear is like the wilderland – Stepping stones or sinking sand.
White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn’t have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It’s basically militant.
Back then, I didn’t have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn’t enough time.
I do have this reputation for being a serious person.
I used to be monastic, almost. Now I’m like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I’m catching up on Americana.