Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.
I'd love to write a country album with Adele.
A lot of the time it feels like… music is some sort of excuse to be a human. It’s kind of like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.
Love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you freeto be more like the man you were made to be
I think it was T. S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it’s understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don’t have a clue what they’re on about.
I approach my life haphazardly. Not much holiness and only as much wisdom as I can muster.
A lot of the time writers are just sponges. . . for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.
When I was sixteen I was pretending to be Charlie Musselwhite. I had a long raincoat on, my hair slicked back, and the shades.
I can write, boy, I can write. That's what I do. The trouble is that it's too bloody easy for people, that's why music is in the sorry state that it is. Any idiot, actors mainly, can go in there, sing a chord, bang on a machine. . . I'm not objecting to that but when people get at me for trying to say something in a rock 'n' roll mode it's as if I'm the freak.
You can never really justify wages in the entertainment business, but it is what it is.
Across Africa there is what I call a colonialist mentality or orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that a lot of things have gone wrong in Africa in the post-colonial period. And time and time again, any time something went wrong, the leadership claims that it was never their fault.