Pastoral Resources

I love to be with my son and my grandchildren, like normal people. I have no particular idea of what I represent to other people. It's very mysterious to me. I don't understand it.

James Brown became my father. He would talk to me the way a father talked to a son. He became the father I never had.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.

When I was about 3, my grandfather used to give me and my sister a nickel to sit out on the front porch with him and sing songs.

I wish I had a nickel for every song that I've left in the bathroom, written down on a matchbox, or just totally forgotten about.

I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I had 25 or 30 songs. Sequencing the record, I left that to the producer. I'm not into doing that stuff.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

I don't know too many people because I stay at my house, I write songs, I go to the store.

I tend to think of all the songs the same - I give them all kind of equal rights.

I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.

I was told my son was killed in the war on terror. He was killed by George Bush's war of terror on the world.

My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny.

So, once I've written a song, you know, I'm pretty happy with what the song is on its own terms.

I also wanted to make a record that was about other things than romance, yeah, after two years on the road singing all the songs from the first album, I got kind of tired of that.

And frankly, when I made that record, hit songs were not what I was trying to achieve.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.