The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.
The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.
If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.
Peace might sell, but who’s buying?
Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
I’m lucky to have met so many people who have been involved in peace and who have been peace prize winners.
Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.
The search is in the doing.
I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.
There is chaos. There’s bloodshed. There’s carnage.
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.
Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper’s Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone?
Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello.
The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.
And my voice now is a struggle, it’s a daily struggle to keep it up. Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day.
Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.
If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people’s music, which I’ve done for years. But still, it’d be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.
I’d hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.
Some people don’t even notice. “Oh, you sound exactly like you did!” And I say, “OK, if that’s what you want to believe, that’s fine.”
We need to have faith in the people who are giving this movement direction to be smart enough to stay one step ahead of what’s coming up next.