I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.
Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.
Every person’s every action has an effect.
But there’s nothing that gives me more thrill than when I’m writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it’s just perfect. There’s nothing that exciting.
And I don’t think that success is going to destroy me at this point in my life, like I used to think.
My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.
I have a real worker-bee mentality. Just show up, just do it. Even if you feel like s – t and you think you’re terrible and you’ll never get better and it will never go anywhere, just show up and do it. And, eventually, something happens.
I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.
My dad had more compassion than me. He was nonjudgmental. He didn’t care where you stood politically. He just took you as a person on face value. He could love all stripes, and that’s why all stripes claim him. He didn’t judge.
It is the people who scream the loudest about America and Freedom who see to be the most intolerant for a differing point of view.
I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.
I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.
No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home.
For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.
And I kind of said to myself if I get my voice back I’m not going to take back the old anxiety about it and just focus on the limitations. I’m really going to enjoy it.
Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.
Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.
When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they’re still coming.
Reading inspirational and motivational quotes daily is like taking my vitamins.
Documenting one’s life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit.